Time Bandits (1981‪)‬ The Spectator Film Podcast

This week on The Spectator Film Podcast… Time Bandits (1981) 4.24.20 Featuring: Austin, Maxx Commentary track begins at 15:44 — Notes — We watched the Criterion Collection release of Time Bandits for the show this week. It’s a solid release with strong supplemental materials and an engaging commentary track recorded by the filmmakers in 1997. “Time Bandits: Guerrilla Fantasy” by David Sterritt — Here’s the accompanying essay with the Criterion Collection release of the movie. “‘Time Bandits’: The Ever-Lasting Importance of Terry Gilliam’s Best Fairy Tale” from Cinephilia and Beyond — As usual, Cinephilia and Beyond proves to be one-stop shopping for anyone looking to learn more about the films they enjoy. On this page you’ll find a PDF of Gilliam and Palin’s Time Bandits script, Gilliam’s original storyboards, and other material from the production and marketing of the film. Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton by Andrew Britton, Ed. Barry Keith Grant — Here’s the link to a published collection of Andrew Britton’s film criticism. We’ve only relied upon Britton’s writing in our preparation once before, but the precision of his insights is genuinely remarkable. Britton avoids over-reliance on structuralist language, and the clarity of his arguments make his writing very enjoyable. We’ll include some of the relevant passages from his essay “Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Cinema” below: “Artifacts which tell us that we are being entertained… also tell us that they are promoting ‘escape,’ and this is the most significant thing about them. They tell us that we are ‘off duty’ and that nothing is required of us but to sit back, relax, and enjoy. Entertainment, that is, defines itself in opposition to labor, or, more generally, to the large category ‘the rest of life,’ as inhabitants of which we work for others, do not, in the vast majority of cases, enjoy our labor, and are subject to tensions and pressures that the world of entertainment excludes. It is of the essence that entertainment defines itself thus while appearing, at the same time, as a world unto itself. It does relate to ‘the rest of life,’ but only by way of its absolute otherness, and when the rest of life puts in an appearance, it is governed by laws which we are explicitly asked to read as being different from the laws which operate elsewhere. The explicitness of these strategies—the fact that they are always mediated by some form of direct address—is the crucial point. It is a condition of the function of entertainment that it should admit that the rest of life is profoundly unsatisfying… Entertainment tells us to forget our troubles and to get happy, but it also tells us that in order to do so we must agree deliberately to switch life off” (100-101). “The feeling that reality is intolerable is rapturously invoked but in such a way as to suggest that reality is immutable and that the desire to escape or transcend it is appropriate only to scheduled moments of consciously indulgent fantasy for which the existing organization of reality makes room. The ideology of entertainment is one of the many means by which late capitalism renders the idea of transforming the real unavailable for serious consideration” (101). “It leaves out everything about the existing reality principle that we would prefer to forget, redescribes other things which are scarcely forgettable in such a way that we can remember them without discomfort (and even with uplift), and anticipates rejection of the result by defining itself as a joke. Thus, Reaganite entertainment plays a game with our desire. It invites us to take pleasure in the worlds it creates and the values they embody, but because it is also ironic about them, it co