Mike Nichols. Elizabeth Taylor. Richard Burton. An expletive-filled broadway play. A draconian Hays Code on its last legs. These were the ingredients for a film that would shake hollywood to its core in the mid 60’s. We talk about a notorious production, the scenes that astounded us, and how the film feels like an inspiration for filmmakers like Cassavetes, Aster, and the Safdies.

Next week: Black Girl (1966) by Ousmane Sembène

Hosted by Zachary Domes (hetchy on letterboxd) and J Brooks Young (jyoun on letterboxd). Music by hetchy

French New Wave gets all the publicity, but the Soviet New Wave might be the most astounding development that cinema had seen to date. In this episode, we talk about the precursors to Sergei Parajanov’s career-changing, and medium-changing, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, from Dovzhenko to Tarkovsky, and the films this Ukrainian folk art epic inspired, like Children of Men. We also discuss how folk art and music affects us deeply in this day and age when so much of culture is manufactured and lacking any tradition. And we explain what’s happening in the film plot-wise, with the help of the original short story.

Next week: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

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Hosted by Zachary Domes (hetchy on letterboxd) and J Brooks Young (jyoun on letterboxd). Music by hetchy

We take a break from the 60’s to discuss the new film from director Celine Song, Materialists, a contemporary romantic drama that has divided audiences. After that, we talk about our trip to the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and some of the standout films shown there from directors like Radu Jude and Hong Sang-soo.

2:09 - Materialists

21:58 - Materialists w/ spoilers

41:59 - Berlinale intro

43:21 - Magic Farm

44:12 - If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

46:45 - Kontinental ‘25

49:46 - What Does that Nature Say to You?

52:04 - Dreams (Sex Love)

57:59 - Dressed in Blue (1983)

Next week: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) by Sergei Parajanov

Send questions and comments to unauthorizedpod@gmail.com

Hosted by Zachary Domes (hetchy on letterboxd) and J Brooks Young (jyoun on letterboxd). Music by hetchy

Agnès Varda arrived as a filmmaker before the french new wave became a known trend (La Pointe Courte, 1955), and endured in the culture decades after it faded from public consciousness. Overlooked doesn’t begin to describe the biases she faced as a young female director; at least one american critic labeled Cléo From 5 to 7 as a derivative clone of earlier new wave films, not aware that Varda had released a stylistically daring feature film before Chabrol, Truffaut, or Godard. Her third film, Le Bonheur, arrived as Godard was being crowned the artiste-du-jour, and while her film shared a jury prize with Polanski’s Repulsion at Berlin, she would receive criticism for the film’s “absurdity” and “immaturity”. To make sense of Le Bonheur’s place in history, we talk second wave feminism, polyamory, and mixing documentary and fiction.

Next week: Materialists (2025), Berlin Film Festival, and more!

Send questions and comments to unauthorizedpod@gmail.com

Hosted by Zachary Domes (hetchy on letterboxd) and J Brooks Young (jyoun on letterboxd). Music by hetchy

Jean-Luc Godard’s feature film-shaped provocations have incited eye rolls and ire since the start: in the leftist literary mag Les Lettres Françaises, Louis Marcorelles read Pierrot Le Fou for filth, likening it to “the refusal to construct a film, to tell a story.” But in a later issue of that same publication, poet Louis Aragon settled the score, declaring Godard himself to be “art today.” Godard’s deification says as much about the times as it does the man himself; the 60’s were pretty square, mostly. Youths and the youthful were ready for someone to erase the borders of polite society, and this brash, self-obsessed filmmaker was more than happy to.

We try to match Godard’s freak and mash-up his life, work, his influences and the influenced, and talk it out!

Next week: Le Bonheur (1965) by Agnès Varda

We’re recording a grab-bag episode soon on 2025 films and our film history project, send questions and comments to unauthorizedpod@gmail.com

Hosted by Zachary Domes (hetchy on letterboxd) and J Brooks Young (jyoun on letterboxd). Music by hetchy

We talk a lot on this show about film festivals, and film itself as a mass-produced art form, redefining the vertices of contact between cultures post-WWII, and Satyajit Ray is one filmmaker that changed countless people’s perceptions of India in the 50’s. We chart his history at the euro festivals as a way of understanding his stature in the wider film world, and we talk about this virtuoso film, and what moved us.

Next week: Pierrot le Fou (1965) by Jean-Luc Godard

We’re recording a grab-bag episode soon on 2025 films and our film history project, send questions and comments to unauthorizedpod@gmail.com

Hosted by Zachary Domes (hetchy on letterboxd) and J Brooks Young (jyoun on letterboxd). Music by hetchy

Bicycle Thieves topped the first BFI Sight and Sound List of the Greatest Films of All Time, published in 1952. Vittorio De Sica’s portrait of an impoverished family, shot all across the real streets of Rome, was the perfect avatar for postwar italian cinema, which astonished audiences and made the cinema of carefully designed sets feel dated and fake in comparison.

So when the new Sight and Sound list arrived in ’62, the fact that Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura came two votes short of the #1 spot (and four votes ahead of Bicycle Thieves) signaled a shift in attitudes. De Sica’s neorealism was passé, patronizing, and obvious. Antonioni’s modernism was startlingly provocative, unresolved, and new. Red Desert in ’64 would cap off this series of films set in Italy with soon-to-be ex-partner Monica Vitti, and it challenged audiences more than ever. Critics loved it — but how does it stand up today? We talk about it.

Next week: Charulata (1964) by Satyajit Ray

Hosted by Zachary Domes (hetchy on letterboxd) and J Brooks Young (jyoun on letterboxd). Music by hetchy

How does a silly goofy comedy take a young director of minor note and launch him into the upper echelon of auteurs to pay attention to in the 60’s? Before he was the patron saint of film bros, Stanley Kubrick was a low budget film stylist, a hired hand for Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, and a provocateur still in search of the right buttons to push. We talk about how Lolita and Dr. Strangelove attempt to push the envelope in very different ways, and we answer the age-old question — what’s the deal with Peter Sellers?

Next week: Red Desert (1964) by Michelangelo Antonioni

Hosted by Zachary Domes (hetchy on letterboxd) and J Brooks Young (jyoun on letterboxd). Music by hetchy