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