Sometimes the Criterion Collection goes and does a silly thing, like releasing Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone as Spine 666. How spooky! One of the great Mexican director's films about how fascism is bad for children - a lesson we as a society apparently do actually keep needing to learn - The Devil's Backbone sets a ghost story at an orphanage during the waning years of the Spanish Civil War, just before Franco cemented power. The release is also chock full of del Toro and his collaborators talking about the film, its politics, and its special effects.
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Spine 665: Babette's Feast
Gabriel Axel's beautiful Babette's Feast (1987) looks at food as art and art as freedom. "Give me leave to do my utmost" - allow each of us the resources and time to create and any of us can create. Capital destroys the Commune, destroys the freedom of resources, creates scarcity and destroys art. But still the artist lives, and lives abundantly.
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Spine 664: The Life of Oharu
We are very happy to finally get another Kenji Mizoguchi film with The Life of Oharu (1952), a film that kicked off a postwar boon for the famed Japanese director. This melancholy tale shows us the dangers of patriarchy and social hierarchy, like how it can lead to Mifune getting cameo'd to death.
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Spine 663: Shoah Additional Materials
In addition to Shoah (1985), the Criterion release contains three of the five additional films Claude Lanzmann has made from the footage he shot for his landmark documentary. A Visitor from the Living (1997) is an interview with Maurice Rossel in which Lanzmann swings hard at Rossel's report for the Red Cross on conditions in the "potemkin ghetto" of Theresienstadt. In Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001) Lanzmann speaks with Yehuda Lerner about his participation in the Sobibor revolt. While Jan Karski is interviewed in a significant portion of Shoah, The Karski Report (2010) is day two of that interview, wherein Karski recounts his heroic efforts to inform Allied officials, including FDR, about the Nazis' extermination of the Jewish people of Europe, hoping to force the Allies to act to save them. As Karski said in a later interview with Hannah Rosen in 1995: "The Allies considered it impossible and too costly to rescue the Jews, because they didn't do it." Ending genocidal authoritarianism seems impossible until we act. And we must act, from Cop City to Gaza City we must act.
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Spine 663: Shoah Era 2
The second half of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) focuses on explicit details of how the Nazi's machinery of mass murder worked, on the industrialization and logistics of the business end of it. Lanzmann also focuses on just how incomprehensible the scale of violence was, how no one who had not seen it with their own eyes could believe that humans were capable of such inhumanity, how even victims mere moments from their death could scarcely believe it. And we end with stories of resistance and revolt.
Shoah doesn't deal with the "why" of the Holocaust, but the "how", and Lanzmann presses his interviewees - victims, witnesses, and perpetrators - on that "how" to explicit and horrifying detail. But this detail must be seen, must be known, must be believed, to truly never let it happen again, to be able to stand against genocide no matter where it takes place now, from the US's deportation machines to the murder of thousands of children in Gaza.
The Adam Glass and John Patrick Owatari-Dorgan attempt the sisyphean task of watching every movie in the ever-growing Criterion Collection. Want to support us? We’ll love you for it: www.Patreon.com/LostInCriterion
Ireland