The Film Comment Podcast

2021 marked the birth centenary of Amos Vogel, the pioneering film programmer, author, and co-founder of the New York Film Festival. To mark this occasion and honor Vogel’s path-blazing legacy, last year the festival inaugurated the Amos Vogel Lecture, to be delivered annually by an artist or thinker who embodies the spirit of Vogel’s cinephilia and brings it into conversation with the present and future of cinema. For this second edition of the Lecture, NYFF welcomed the filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith, whose landmark 1998 debut feature, Drylongso, screened in a new restoration in the Revivals section of this year’s festival. Known for the political rigor and intrepid formal experimentation of her film and multimedia practice, Smith epitomizes both the ethics of care and the commitment to subversion that guided Vogel’s mission. Smith’s address is followed by a Q&A with Jacqueline Stewart, the director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and a Turner Classic Movies host, and is presented here for the first time. The 2022 Amos Vogel Lecture is sponsored by Turner Classic Movies. NYFF Talks are presented by HBO.

“Cinema is never on time,” wrote the great critic Serge Daney. That statement never seemed to apply to Jean-Luc Godard, an auteur who was always of his time and ahead of it—a relentless interrogator of the present who also sought the horizons of a new future. This week, as we mourn the recent passing of one of our greatest artists, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited two critics and Godard experts for a talk about the filmmaker’s life and career. Richard Brody writes about movies for The New Yorker and is the author of the must-read Godard biography, Everything Is Cinema, and Blair McClendon is a film editor, regular Film Comment contributor, and author of a beautiful remembrance of Godard published by n+1. The four discussed Godard’s vast and protean filmography, from foundational works like Breathless and La Chinoise to masterful essay films like Goodbye to Language and The Image Book, and the ways in which Godard’s films awakened them, in their formative cinephilic years, to the aesthetic and political potentialities of cinema.

As we head into the last weekend of the 2022 Toronto Film Festival, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish welcomes Adam Nayman (critic and certified Toronto native), Vadim Rizov (director of operations at Filmmaker Magazine), and Beatrice Loayza (associate web editor at the Criterion Collection) to talk about some of the major titles from this year's lineup, including The Fabelmans, Dry Ground Burning, Women Talking, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, The Whale, and the Bulgari ad directed by Paolo Sorrentino that plays before every TIFF screening.

We’re reporting this week from one of the major film events of the fall: the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 8 to 18. Throughout this year’s festival, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from the lineup with a rotating crew of critics and special guests. For our third podcast dispatch from Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish is joined by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Madeline Whittle and critic Mark Asch to talk about Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and Bloodshed, Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul, Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People's Children, Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, and more.

We’re reporting this week from one of the major film events of the fall: the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 8 to 18. Throughout this year’s screening, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from the lineup with a rotating crew of critics and special guests. For our second dispatch from the Tim Horton–studded mean streets of Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish welcomes Cristina Nord (head of the Berlinale Forum), Chloe Lizotte (editorial manager at MUBI Notebook), and Beatrice Loayza (associate web editor at the Criterion Collection) to talk about some of their favorites from the fest, including Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, Lars von Tier’s The Kingdom Exodus, Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, Moyra Davey’s Horse Opera, Stéphane Lafleur’s Viking, and more.

Hold Me Tight, the latest directorial venture from actor and filmmaker Mathieu Amalric, is a riveting, kaleidoscopic entry to the canon of movies about women on the verge. The film, which opened on September 9, features Vicky Krieps as Clarisse, a young mother on the run who may—or may not, depending on your reading of the story—be going through indescribable grief. The actor turns in a performance of mesmerizing fluidity and mystery, as Amalric’s elliptical storytelling keeps the audience guessing about the nature of Clarisse’s reality.  Last week, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish welcomed the director and star for a Film Comment Live talk about their new movie, the narrative and cinematic balancing act of depicting a mind in flux, the film’s imaginative use of music, and much more.

Once again we’ve arrived at that special time of year known as festival season. Today we kick off our coverage of one of the fall’s major film events, the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 8 to 18. Throughout this year’s festival, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from this year’s lineup, alongside our rotating crew of critics and special guests. First up, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish welcomes critics and programmers Jordan Cronk, Inney Prakash, and Bedatri Choudhury to discuss Jafar Panahi’s No Bears, Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, the experimental Wavelengths shorts program, and more. Stay tuned for more from the Tim Horton–studded mean streets of Toronto!

This week, Clint surveys the wealth of cinematic delights on offer this fall across repertory calendars, both in person in New York City and online. To guide him through the thicket of newly rediscovered gems, lost classics, and thematic programs, he is joined by three experts: critic and filmmaker Gina Telaroli; Inney Prakash, programmer and founder of the Prismatic Ground festival; and Steve Macfarlane, programmer at Spectacle Theater and department assistant at the Museum of Modern Art. They discuss Anthology Film Archives’ ongoing Imageless Films series, the upcoming Hugo Fregonese and Beth and Scott B retrospectives at MoMA, the online series Spectral Grounds: Black Experimental Film, and much more. Check the show notes on filmcomment.com for more information.

At this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish participated in a fascinating experimental event called “The Future of Attention”, curated by Rafael Dernbach, a researcher at the Universita della Svizzera italiana. A continuous 24-hour live talk moderated by three hosts—including Devika—and involving a new guest each hour, the event began at noon on August 10 and went on all the way to noon on August 11. Attendees were invited to sit, lounge, or even sleep in the audience as and when they wished. The idea was to not just discuss the workings of attention in contemporary film and media culture, but also to actively experience and challenge the various forms our attention may take over a sustained period of time. We hope you’ve been following along the last two weeks as we’ve shared excerpts from Devika’s hosting shift at the event, featuring conversations with filmmaker Helena Wittman, curator Giovanni Carmine, this year’s Golden Leopard–winner Julia Murat, and others. Our final episode is with a guest who has a job like no other: it’s Kevin B. Lee, Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at Locarno Film Festival and USI. Kevin joined Devika to close out the 24-hour event with a fascinating discussion on how labor, pleasure, and the special state of attention that we call cinema. Listen to the complete series here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/podcast/the-future-of-attention/

Welcome to the Film Comment Podcast! I'm Devika Girish, the Co-Deputy Editor of Film Comment. Recently, I was at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where I participated in a fascinating experimental event called The Future of Attention, curated by Rafael Dernbach, a researcher at the Universita della Svizzera Italiana. It was a continuous 24-hour live talk, moderated by 3 hosts—including yours truly—and involving a new guest each hour. The event began at noon on August 10, and went on all the way to noon on August 11, with attendees invited to sit, lounge, or even sleep in the audience when they wished. The idea was not just to discuss the workings of attention in contemporary film and media culture but also to actively experience and challenge the various ways in which we pay attention over a sustained period of time. We hope you’ve been following along the last two weeks as we’ve shared excerpts from Devika’s hosting shift at the event, featuring conversations with filmmaker Helena Wittman, curator Giovanni Carmine, this year’s Golden Leopard–winner Julia Murat, and others. Next up is a very exciting guest: artist, filmmaker, and critic, Hito Steyerl, who talks about teaching on Minecraft during the pandemic, maintaining techno-optimisim in very pessimistic times, and the distinction between attention and voyeurism.