The Film Comment Podcast

This week’s podcast features a conversation with Ira Deutchman, the director of the new documentary, Searching for Mr. Rugoff. The film explores the life and work of the infamous movie-theater impresario Don Rugoff. In a 1975 Film Comment profile, Stuart Byron writes that Rugoff might be best remembered as the man who "made Manhattan's Upper East Side rather than Times Square the prime area for motion picture exhibition in New York, substituted Colombian coffee for popcorn, and—to the chagrin of critics like Andrew Sarris and the delight of those like John Simon—turned 'movies' into 'films.'" Ira, a longtime producer and distributor, has a secret Film Comment connection: in the '90s, he penned the magazine’s anonymous industry column, Grosses Gloss. To pick Ira’s brain about his days working for Rugoff, his extensive knowledge of the New York City exhibition landscape, and the transformation of the indie business over the last half century, we invited a special guest host: Film Comment publisher and industry veteran Eugene Hernandez.

As the dog days of summer loom, we’ve been pining for the crisp, air-conditioned darkness of the cinema. Fortunately, as theaters across the country have begun to re-open, seeing a favorite old movie in the dark, with other people, is no longer a distant dream. For this week’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Clinton Krute sat down with two programmers and writers, Abby Sun and Steve Macfarlane, for wide-ranging conversation about the current repertory landscape—about what’s changed over the past year, for the better and for the worse, and where things might be headed in the near future. They discuss the rapid evolution and proliferation of virtual rep offerings during the pandemic, as well as the programming of the latest Flaherty Seminar and several choice offerings at Film Forum and elsewhere.

After a Cannes-less 2020, we were glad to welcome back cinema’s grandest event this year. Film Comment followed the much-awaited 2021 edition’s superb lineup with the help of an on-the-Croisette crew of contributors—you can read their thoughtful dispatches and interviews here. On today’s podcast—the second of an epic two-parter—Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute welcomed FC contributing editor Jonathan Romney and critic and programmer Miriam Bale to talk about some of the festival’s biggest films. They dug into Memoria, Annette, Drive My Car, The Souvenir Part II, Bergman Island, Vortex, and more. Don’t miss the first part of the conversation, covering Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or–winner Titane, Bruno Dumont’s France, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, and more: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-cannes-2021-part-1-jonathan-romney-miriam-bale-titane-julia-ducournau/

After a Cannes-less 2020, we were glad to welcome back cinema’s grandest event. Film Comment followed the festival’s stellar lineup with the help of an on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast—the first of an epic two-parter—Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute welcomed FC contributing editor Jonathan Romney and critic and programmer Miriam Bale to dish on some of their festival viewing. They talked about Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or -winner Titane, Bruno Dumont’s France, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Compartment No. 6, Red Rocket, La Fracture, Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, and more. Stay tuned for part two of the conversation, covering Annette, Memoria, The Souvenir Part II, and many more.

As the good old U. S. of A. celebrated yet another year around the sun, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited critic A.S. Hamrah to hold forth on the varied, colorful, and often bleak visions of America on the screen. They asked him to pick some movies that evoked the stars and stripes, or the spirit of ’76, and Scott responded with 13 picks—one for each of the original colonies.  Each one of Scott's choices—which include The Wolf of Wall Street, Kajillionaire, Good Time, Leave No Trace, Class Relations, and Trash Humpers—sparked a spirited conversation about the state of the nation. Devika and Clint added in some of their own picks: John Sayles’s The Brother From Another Planet, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, and more. See the full list of movies in the show notes at https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-happy-birthday-america-a-s-hamrah/

In the introduction to her new book on James Benning’s 2004 film, Ten Skies, critic and scholar Erika Balsom writes: “there are films that present themselves as complex objects but which are in fact quite simple … And then there are films—rarer altogether—that appear simple but harbour tremendous complexity. Such is the deception, the allure, of Ten Skies—a film messier and more profuse than my immediate love for it had allowed.” Balsom joined me to talk about the book (out now from Fireflies Press) and the many-sided approach she took to writing about one of the most deceptively simple—and beautiful—films in Benning’s fantastically varied body of work. We also discussed where Ten Skies fits into his filmography, the ways in which Benning plays with his own identity, how ten static shots of clouds can be a powerful political statement, and much more. Balsom will introduce a screening of Ten Skies at Light Industry in Brooklyn on July 1.

A couple weeks ago, I (Devika) visited the Artists Space gallery in downtown Manhattan to check out the ongoing exhibit, "Feel at Home Here," by New Red Order—a “public secret society” with rotating members who creates exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and re-channel our relationships to indigeneity. As I walked into the gallery, the lobby welcomed me with an assortment of marketing paraphernalia: a poster advertised “Savage Philosophy™”; a red landline invited me to call a hotline; and a screen played a video of a white man exhorting me to “never settle” and to realize my "fullest potential” by joining his organization, New Red Order.  Was this the merchandise section of the gallery? A marketing or recruitment video? Or a parody? I couldn’t quite tell at first. This slippage between satire and fact, which constantly reminds us of the all-too-real absurdity of the settler colonial project, is the modus operandi of New Red Order. As I walked further into the exhibit, one wall featured a sardonic timeline of the history of the Improved Order of Red Men, a whites-only political society that New Red Order riffs on subversively. One section of the room was modeled as a real-estate office for “Giving Back™" land. And the centerpiece featured a rotating video installation, which included New Red Order’s ongoing feature-film-slash-recruitment-campaign, Never Settle. To dig into the exhibit’s provocative plays with time, futurity, guilt, ownership, and desire, I spoke to New Red Order’s “core contributors," as they describe themselves: Jackson Polys, Adam Khalil, and Zack Khalil. Today’s podcast presents a short excerpt of our conversation, featuring Adam and Jackson, but look out for the full interview in the Film Comment Letter on Thursday, June 24. For show notes, go filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-new-red-order

This week, we sat down with critics K. Austin Collins and Mayukh Sen—to talk about one of the most enduring motifs in movie history: the double.  We delved into a hand-picked selection of mirroring movies, including Brian de Palma’s underrated Femme Fatale, Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan, Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappé, and Bimal Roy’s Madhumati, a film released the same year as—and with some eerie similarities to—that urtext of double features, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.  As we discovered, doubles, mirrors, and dubious impersonators can be found in nearly every era and genre of cinema, with the trope generating an apparently endless variety of themes, narrative forms, and interpretations.

Last year’s hybrid New York Film Festival was an oasis amid the movie desert of the pandemic, but we sorely missed seeing the selections in the dark of Film at Lincoln Center’s theaters. So we were overjoyed when a “redux” version of the festival was announced for this summer, with much of the 2020 lineup playing on the big screen. To dig into the highlights of this encore edition and the films that must be seen big (or seen again,) we sat down with FLC programmer Dan Sullivan and curator and critic Steve Macfarlane. We discussed some underseen gems from the Revivals section, including William Klein’s Muhammad Ali: The Greatest and Marie-Claude Treilhou’s Simone Barbes or Virtue, and went long on Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo’s Slow Machine and some standout episodes from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology.

This week on the podcast, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute went to school with two learned FC veterans: Nellie Killian, curator and FC contributing editor, and Ina Archer, artist, critic, and media preservationist at the National Museum of African-American History & Culture. Each of them assigned the group a movie to watch. We’re calling this episode “homework,” but fear not, their selections were far from a chore!  Ina selected Murder at the Vanities (1934), Mitchell Leisen’s madcap Pre-Code caper, while Nellie suggested Honey Moccasin, a 1998 experimental gem by Indigenous filmmaker Shelley Niro. Both selections were zany, incredibly inventive, and very much of their times. They made for a great double feature. We learned a lot from the conversation and hope you will, too. Pop quiz coming up soon! For links to the films and more, go to the show notes at https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-homework/