1. I'm Not Entirely Joking

If you’ve ever seen a Whit Stillman film, such as Metropolitan, the odds are you’d recognize another. Each of Stillman’s films features this kind of smart, witty, multilayered dialogue–often focusing on an ensemble of young people who have read a lot more about life than they’ve lived, fearing that they are at the tail end of an age of prosperity, looking ahead with apprehension or refusing to look forward at all in favor of attempting a Gatsby-like recreation of the past. More than that, they grapple with the concept of failure in its many dimensions: failure to develop into the person you want to be, failure to acquire the means to live the life you want, failure to appreciate what you have, and failure to preserve the worthwhile traditions of the past in a rapidly shifting world. 

Stillman, though he bristles at the affiliation, emerges out of what is called the Auteur movement, a construction rooted in French criticism in the 1950s as they looked back at classical Hollywood hits of the 1930s and 1940s. Simply, they argued for the celebration of a filmmaker’s body of work as a coherent whole. Thus the body of work could be viewed through a lens of authorship, with the director as authority analogous to the way we view a singular ownership over the work of novels by their writers or paintings by their artists.

This is the first of five episode charting the life, career, and influence of Stillman during the rise of a new American auteur movement in the 1990s, featuring conversations with Stillman himself, collaborators like actor Taylor Nichols and composer Mark Suozzo, as well as critics Fran Hoepfner, Marya E. Gates, and Girish Shambu. Join us each week as we work through Stillman's filmography and contextualize it in a constantly shifting cinematic landscape.

The Entertainment was created and is hosted by Tom Knoblauch. The show is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio and is produced by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show featured music and clips from Metropolitan, Jules and Jim, The Wild Angels, and Filmmaker Magazine’s podcast Back to One.

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