Annie Baker and Lucian Johnston

“We're going to start with L'enfance nue by the director and writer Maurice Pialat, one of my favorite writer-directors. This is from 1968, it's about a foster child being shuttled around France and moving from family to family. It's like one of the most unsentimental movies about childhood I've ever seen. I felt like it was the first movie I'd seen with a child lead who you didn't necessarily sympathize with for most of the movie, and then once you understand him it's totally devastating.”

“Okay, L'argent. Other than Pialat, the other filmmaker we talked about a lot when we were cutting Janet Planet was Bresson. I feel like Bresson was more of like an aesthetic reference for us too. I remember specifically about L'argent we were talking about depictions of offscreen violence. I always think of the end when at the farm, the old couple, when the husband slaps his wife, instead of seeing the slap he cuts away and you just see the teacup on the saucer and it just moves a little bit.”

“A Matter of Life and Death. Initially in Janet Planet we were going to have a character disappear on screen and we were obsessed with how to do it. I kept watching the disappearances in this movie on the Criterion Channel and sending them to you and you would calculate how many frames the disappearance was. There's just something about the way that Powell and Pressburger films look. Their cinematographer Jack Cardiff was incredible. There's some scene where the fog lifts and it's so trippy.”

“I'll do Godland. This movie was one of my very top favorites of 2023 and maybe ever. The DP is our amazing DP Maria von Hausswolff and so much of watching this movie for me was like seeing the way Maria sees nature and the world through the way she shot this movie. I think in particular of a descending shot of a waterfall at one point. They actually made the journey themselves across Iceland. They shot with all natural light except for like two scenes that were just candlelight.”

“Design for Living. I'm obsessed with this movie. I have a poster of this movie in my study. This is from 1933, this is immediately pre-code. It wouldn't even be made now because it's so ambiguous but also incredibly blatant. She's in love with two men, they're in love with her. This was based on a Noël Coward play. Fredric March and Gary Cooper are so incredible and beautiful and hilarious and Miriam Hopkins is such a specific person. There's something about the movie that I find so life affi...”

“It's like talking about Varda. This is so good, there's so much good stuff. Daguerréotypes is my favorite of all the films in this collection. I find it very difficult to talk about film editing, but in this film, there's a sequence in one of the local cafes where a magician is putting on his act and she's showing you how she's making the associations while she's making them. It's very playful and it feels almost like a precursor to what John Wilson is doing now. It's some of the best editing.”