The Film Comment Podcast

This Friday, a new restoration of the 1989 indie classic Chameleon Street opens at BAM. Wendell B. Harris’s utterly unique satire follows a real-life compulsive conman, Douglas Street, whose increasingly risky scams demonstrate both a sociopathic genius and a deep pathos. Wendell not only wrote and directed the film, but, like his hero Orson Welles, also played the lead character, with all of the dangerous charm of a man who conned his way into a surgical theater. On today’s podcast, Wendell joins FC Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish for a fascinating oral history of the making of Chameleon Street, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He also revealed that he’s pulled some cons of his own: in 1978, he scored an interview with classic Hollywood actor Hurd Hatfield by pretending to be a Film Comment reporter. Wendell, when you find the tape, please send it our way! Better late than never.

In an NYFF lineup with a record number of new and emerging filmmakers, Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? and Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider—both sophomore features—stood out for their sui generis approaches to cinematic narrative and form. Formally assured and intellectually audacious, the two films, in their own unique ways, electrify the quotidian with currents of desire, romance, and modern myth. During the festival last week, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish sat down with Silvan Zürcher and Koberidze—who are old friends from their time together at the the renowned DFFB (the German Film and Television Academy Berlin)—for an in-depth talk. The conversation covered the two directors' filmic inspirations and aspirations, their trajectories within Swiss and Georgian cinema, the whimsical play with time and place in their movies, and much more. A special thanks to HBO, the presenting partner of all NYFF Talks.

Two films in this year’s NYFF lineup take us back to the ‘60s heyday of the New York avant-garde: in the Main Slate, Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground offers a revelatory portrait of the milieu that gave rise to the eponymous band and its boundary-pushing music, while in Revivals, Ed Lachman’s Songs for Drella captures Lou Reed and John Cale in concert, paying tribute to the late Andy Warhol with riveting intimacy. On Sunday, October 3, Film Comment editor Devika Girish and Clinton Krute joined Haynes, Lachman, critic Amy Taubin, and the editors of The Velvet Underground, Affonso Gonçalvez and Adam Kurnitz, for a roundtable talk. In our wide-ranging conversation on the stage of Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center. We touched on the making of the two films, as well as the enduring legacy of the historic moment of artistic innovation they so vividly evoke. Stay tuned to filmcomment.com for more coverage of this year’s New York Film Festival, both on the podcast, and in the Film Comment Letter.

This week we're reporting from the 59th New York Film Festival. One of the most anticipated films in this year's lineup is The Souvenir Part II—Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to her remarkable 2019 coming-of-age drama, The Souvenir. Following Honor Swinton Byrne’s Julie, a film student, in the aftermath of her boyfriend’s death-by-overdose, the new film deepens the predecessor’s exploration of the boundaries between art and life with tender reflection, wry humor, and some dazzling moments of meta-auto-fiction. We caught up with Joanna while she was in New York for the festival, while Honor joined the conversation from Edinburgh via Zoom. Our lively chat touched upon the film’s layered approach to autobiography, its precisely contrived naturalism, and how the film’s soundtrack draws from Hogg’s memories of youth.

Established in 2020—and picking up where the late, lamented Projections section left off—Currents is the New York Film Festival's home for films with more offbeat, experimental, or hybrid sensibilities. This year’s lineup does not disappoint, with a selection of groundbreaking features and shorts from new and established filmmakers like Matías Piñeiro and Lois Patiño, Claire Simon, Kevin Jerome Everson, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and many more. For this conversation I sat down with critics Chloe Lizotte and Ela Bittencourt to highlight some of our favorites from the section, including Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro’s The Tsugua Diaries, Kiyoshi Sugita’s Haruhara-san’s Recorder, Kiro Russo’s El gran movimiento, and Ted Fendt’s Outside Noise, among other features and shorts. Stay tuned for more coverage of this year’s New York Film Festival, both on the podcast, and in the Film Comment Letter. https://www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

As we enter the thick of fall festival season, it seems that every week brings with it a full slate of amazing new films from all over the world. This week, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute rang up two of their favorite critics, Adam Nayman and José Teodoro, for a look at the 2021 edition of Toronto International Film Festival, which just wrapped this past weekend. José and Adam had much to report on from their hometown fest. They kicked things off with a discussion of some of the bigger movies on offer, including Dune, Spencer, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, and Terence Davies’s Benediction, before diving into films like Silent Land, Sundown, Bergman Island, and more.  And don’t miss José’s dispatch from TIFF in this week’s Film Comment Letter. Sign up today at filmcomment.com.

This week Film Comment is reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival, both virtually and in-person. One of the most anticipated films at this year’s festival is Benediction, the latest feature by British master Terence Davies. It’s a biopic of the English anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon—although, biopic is a bit of a misnomer. Like A Quiet Passion, Davies’s 2015 film about Emily Dickinson, Benediction is a beautifully impressionistic, personal, and indeed poetic account of Sassoon's very colorful life. Davies jumps back and forth in time, melds archival footage and arch scenes of drama, and stages some stunning tableaux that tune us into the ups and downs of Sassoon’s life as a gay man, and the despair that haunted him and his poetry after his stint in World War I. Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish chatted with Davies about the film as well as an eclectic range of subjects: beauty, eternity, poetry, Catholicism, the power of silence, his experiences in the U.K’s gay scene, the horrors of reality television, and more. We hope you enjoy the conversation, and make sure you subscribe to the podcast and to the Film Comment Letter so you can keep up with all our upcoming Toronto coverage. This episode is sponsored by Kino Lorber, presenting Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Wife of a Spy, now in theaters: bit.ly/wifeofaspy

In a 2007 Film Comment essay, Amy Taubin wrote in praise of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, a documentary about the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the communities that bore its brunt. For Amy, “Lee makes it possible for their stories to be inscribed in history. It is left to us not to forget them.” The same could be said of Lee’s epic new mini-series NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021½, a deep-dive into New York City’s recent history of trauma and resilience, from the September 11 attacks to the COVID-19 pandemic. On today’s podcast, FC editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sat down with Amy as well as critic, artist, and archivist Ina Archer to discuss the fascinating sprawl of the show, a highly personal tribute to the spirit of Lee’s hometown.

The summer and fall festival seasons bring a flurry of buzzy premieres at glamorous locales: Cannes, Venice, New York, Toronto. But as most film critics will attest, some of our best festival experiences are at the smaller venues and events that often fly under the radar. These include regional festivals that cater to local audiences, festivals that spotlight newer filmmakers, and lineups focused on specialized programs.  To discuss the role of these festivals and some selections from recent editions, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with one of Film Comment’s most trusted festival correspondents—curator and critic Jordan Cronk. Jordan talked about some of his favorite small festivals, including Black Canvas, RIDM, and True/False, and discussed the prize-winners from the recent edition of FIDMarseille, including Outside Noise and Haruhara San’s Recorder. They also discussed picks from an upcoming archival film festival organized by Arsenal Berlin, and some of Jordan’s personal highlights from Locarno.

On today’s podcast we’re talking about a long-running preoccupation of cinema: sex work. From Taxi Driver to Pretty Woman, sex workers have frequently appeared in the movies as both tragic and romantic figures, but rarely as, well, workers. Two recent releases offer a different, more complex perspective: Lizzie Borden’s 1986 cult classic Working Girls, which was restored and released in July, and Tsai Ming-liang’s latest feature, Days.  We sat down with critics So Mayer and Sarah Fonseca to talk about the ways in which these films reflect on questions of labor, representation, performance, and care. The conversation quickly branched out to many more films, including Leilah Weinraub’s Shakedown, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, Antonio Pietrangeli’s Adua and Her Friends, Fassbinder’s Querelle, and others.