Filmmaking genius or fraud provocateur? The work of John Cassavetes has been the subject of unending adoration and extensive dissection ever since the actor picked up a camera in NYC in the late ‘50s and joined the likes of Jonas Mekas and Shirley Clarke in the burgeoning independent film scene. Almost instantly, he became a cult figure to cinephiles in the know, and while he would go on to make some films for the major studios, his housewife-on-the-edge vehicle for his wife Gena Rowlands could garner no interest from a single studio or distributor. After eventually self-funding, the film would instead go on to be Cassavetes’s biggest hit, an oscar nominee, and a film forever in the critical pantheon.

On this episode, we discuss the film’s loudest naysayer, Pauline Kael, and why the Cassavetes style remains divisive. We also discuss what his imitators get right and get wrong, second-wave feminism, and what the film itself says about the experience of women in the nuclear family.

Next week: Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) by Jacques Rivette

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Music by hetchy

30-some feature films. 24 plays. 3 tv miniseries. Many drugs, many relationships. Dead at 37. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a chaser (in more ways than one), and remains among that rare class of film artists that turned cinema into a verb, into an ongoing process and processing of the world around him. What’s astounding is that his films, while so specific to postwar german society, have a universal resonance that makes them just as worthwhile today.

In talking about his most well-regarded film about the unlikely romance between a moroccan immigrant and an older german woman, Angst essen Seele auf, we untangle the association with Douglas Sirk’s hollywood films, how Fassbinder broke new ground with subjects under-seen in movies, and how immigration and xenophobia remain so fraught in the age of nation-states.

Afterwards (56:00), Zach shares 5 albums from 1974 worth listening to.

Next week: A Woman Under the Influence (1974) by John Cassavetes

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Intro music by hetchy

If Godard and Truffaut busted down the door for a new generation of french filmmakers, Jean Eustache followed them in and stood in the corner and received little attention. After making a few docs and shorts, he finally made a bid for cinematic immortality with this first-person-epic (longer than Jeanne Dielman!), La Maman et la Putain. It stars Jean-Pierre Léaud, the avatar-du-jour for many autobiographical directors, and in this episode we compare Eustache’s film with another experimental french film featuring Léaud’s antics, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1. Why do these films now reside on the Sight and Sound Top 250? We sort out our very different reactions to the Eustache film, talk about his life and philosophy, and grapple with how alien this caustic ‘70s behavior feels today.

Next week: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

UnauthorizedPod.com for more. Hosted by Zachary Domes and J Brooks Young. Music by hetchy