discursion: a film podcast

The year 1990 saw the release of both Twilight and Twin Peaks, detective films set on the periphery which do not share the same level of recognition. In this episode, Dominic and Steven celebrate the former, Hungarian hidden gem and consider aspects of auteurism and audiovisual style at the end of the Cold War. Our reference copy was a Blu-Ray released by Second Run, following the film's restoration.

In episode 20 of discursion, Dominic and Steven take a second look at the twisty Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sangsoo, 2015) in its Grasshopper Blu-Ray edition, a film that provides two different versions of one filmmaker's travels to a festival where he will meet and become enamoured of a young painter (twice over, with different interactions and outcomes that we are invited to observe). As Dennis Lim writes in his recent book on the South Korean director, it is also possible to find in this film that 'repetition is both the realm of the banal and the otherworldly'.

In episode 19, Dominic and Steven turn back the clock to 1941 with an almost forgotten Japanese film directed by Yasujiro Ozu, recently resorted and released for home viewing by the British Film Institute. The director's stylistic trademarks are prominent enough to rediscover and discuss in this story of family negotiating their paternal inheritance and wartime.

Steven and Dominic return with an exploration of secret identity and stylish standoffs in the Hong Kong-set action thriller, Infernal Affairs, recently remastered and released on home video for the Criterion Collection.

Dominic and Steven reconsider Medium Cool (1969). This American cinéma vérité film was directed, shot and scripted by Haskell Wexler, who extensively used handheld cameras before the era of Steadicam technology, partly to track the violence surrounding the Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago. Concludes a mini-series on the mobile camera (episodes 14-17).

Der Letzte Mann (released as The Last Laugh in the USA), directed by F.W. Murnau, is well known for its 'unbounded' moving camera techniques. The film has now been re-issued within a boxset by Eureka Masters of Cinema. Dominic and Steven examine this German silent film across two episodes, beginning with the sympathetic story of a hotel porter stripped of his rank and community status in an archetypal 1920s modern European city. Part of a mini-series on the mobile camera (episodes 14-17).

Dominic and Steven revisit the Max Ophuls French classic 'Madame de...' (1953) which has been released by the BFI on Blu-Ray/DVD. Episode 14 beings a new mini-series of podcasts on interesting camera movements, the theme of which emerges in the course of discussing the film's visual style, performance and use of jewellery.

Steven and Dominic take a closer look at Mona Lisa (1986), the London-set film directed by Neil Jordan and starring Bob Hoskins and Cathy Tyson, with Michael Caine and Robbie Coltrane. Important themes include Hoskins' portrayal of naivety within a gangster world of decay and the film's representation of race. Concludes our episodic theme of the thriller which ranged across the USA, Japan, Korea, and the UK (episodes 9-13).