The Film Comment Podcast

In an essay on the militant films of the Palestine Film Unit for The New York Review of Books, the critic Kaleem Hawa writes that, “Palestinian cinema has always been saddled with the psychic weight of colonization. (...) Film offers liberatory possibilities, then: with the projection of moving images onto a screen, a people can imagine something different, something other.” This week on the podcast, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with Kaleem (who’s also a Film Comment contributor) to discuss our recent home-viewing—which, as it turned out, included a lot of Palestinian cinema. From the agit-prop of Mustafa Abu Ali’s 1974 film They Do Not Exist, to the diasporic longing of Basma AlSharif’s Home Movies Gaza, to the biting satire and media criticism of Elia Suleiman, our conversation covered a lot of fascinating ground. Links to the movies are in our show notes at https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-at-home-palestinian-cinema-edition/.

On this week’s podcast, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish speak to Barry Jenkins, Oscar-winning director of Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, about his latest project, The Underground Railroad. It’s a lush, 10-hour epic that marries Jenkins’s distinctive cinematic sensibilities with the historical fiction of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, which imagines the underground railroad as a real-life network of trains and tunnels. Over 10 episodes, all directed by Jenkins, the show traces the odyssey of a young enslaved woman named Cora after her escape from a plantation in antebellum Georgia. As Cora is pursued from state to state by a seemingly possessed slave catcher, Jenkins combines bracing and often brutal realism with moments of thrilling fantasy and beauty. Film Comment sat down with Jenkins to discuss five key scenes from the series, and the ideas and intricate craft that went into each. Listeners beware! The conversation touches on crucial plot points, so if you're averse to spoilers, please press pause and watch the series first.

This week on the podcast, we went long on an American filmmaker like no other: Melvin Van Peebles. Known for groundbreaking classics like Watermelon Man and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song, Van Peebles invented entirely new cinematic languages while offering trenchant visions of Black American life and masculinity. In 1968, the director made his feature debut with The Story of a Three Day Pass, a dazzlingly multi-layered film about an African-American soldier’s dalliance with a white French woman in Paris. With the film returning to screens this week in a brand-new restoration, we reached out to two Van Peebles superfans: filmmaker Ephraim Asili, director of The Inheritance, and writer and film editor Blair McClendon. We discussed Van Peebles' work and fascinating life, and even got a peek into Ephraim’s extensive collection of Melvin Van Peebles ephemera. Don’t forget to sign up for the Film Comment Letter! It’s a free digital newsletter that will deliver original writing by Film Comment contributors directly to your inbox every Thursday. Sign-up today at filmcomment.com.

“The people are all pale as mushrooms, blending in with the ashen cityscapes, sterile white rooms, and drab, half-empty restaurants. Stuck in meticulously composed dioramas, they enact miniature comedies and tragedies—sometimes it is hard to say which—filled with deadpan humor and haunting bleakness. We could only be in a Roy Andersson movie.” Imogen Sara Smith wrote these words about Andersson’s latest, About Endlessness, which graced the cover of Film Comment’s May-June 2020 issue. The global pandemic was just starting to take hold back then, and the Swedish filmmaker’s work seemed to offer an uncannily apt vision of life in 2020. With About Endlessness finally opening in theaters, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute welcomed Imogen and another long-time FC contributor, Jonathan Romney, for a conversation about the film and its place in Andersson’s utterly distinctive filmography. Don’t forget to sign up for the Film Comment Letter, launching on May 6! It’s a free digital newsletter that will deliver original writing by Film Comment contributors directly to your inbox every Thursday. Sign-up today at filmcomment.com and receive a free digital download of a Film Comment back issue of your choice.

This last year has been a drought for movie-lovers by most standards. But if you’re looking for silver linings, you could do worse than noting that there’s a fresh edition of the New Directors/New Films festival happening a mere four months after the 2020 edition. This year is extra special: it returns the festival to theaters alongside virtual screenings, and it also marks the 50th anniversary of New Directors/New Films. It’s a nice reminder that despite all the doom-saying, cinema’s future remains as vibrant as its past. To preview the lineup, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by critics Vadim Rizov and Chloe Lizotte—both veterans of our 2020 New Directors talk— for a live taping of the podcast. The four discussed festival highlights including Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta, James Vaughan’s Friends and Strangers, Fern Silva’s Rock Bottom Riser, Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden, Mani Kaul's Duvidha, and more. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment.

“A film that centers on a transgender person or storyline enters the culture like any other movie. The difference lies in the discourse around it.” So writes Caden Mark Gardner in a recent essay in the Criterion Collection’s online publication, the Current. “Trans people in movies are written and talked about as if they were abstract concepts, anomalies. For years, it’s been clear that very little attention is being paid (by filmmakers, critics, or marketers) to the ways in which a trans audience might see and react to these attempts at putting their lives in front of the camera, and the cisgender majority continues to control the conversation.” On this week's episode, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute brought together a roundtable of writers and artists who are reframing this conversation: critics Caden and Willow Maclay, and filmmakers Isabel Sandoval and Jessica Dunn Rovinelli. We asked the panel to respond to a number of excellent questions submitted by the Film Comment community, including: How does one define trans cinema? Are visibility and representation important, or should questions of labor be foregrounded? And which classic movies do our panelists consider to be “covertly” trans? The rich and wide-ranging conversation touched upon a number of movies and articles. For show notes, go to filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-trans-cinema-roundtable. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment.

On this week's episode, editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish were joined two excellent writers, both first-timers on the Film Comment Podcast: A. S. Hamrah, film critic at The Baffler, and writer and film editor Blair McClendon, whom you may know from his work on 2020's The Assistant. The original plan was to chat about our recent home viewing, but the conversation kept returning to that age-old fountain of springtime small talk: the Academy Awards. The group focused on a handful of notable nominees—Sound of Metal, Minari, Judas and the Black Messiah, and Nomadland, among others—and also dug into the massive Oscars marketing apparatus, ’90s zine culture, the phenomenon of professional “Oscarologists,” and much, much more. To top it off, the discussion was interrupted by a brief visit from New York’s finest. Fear not! Everyone is safe. Though Margaret, if you’re listening, please be advised. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by: Amazon Studios, presenting Sound of Metal and One Night in Miami. Now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. For your consideration. Learn more here: amazonstudiosguilds.com/films Kino Lorber, presenting Charlène Favier's Slalom. Now playing in select theaters and virtual cinemas nationwide: kinomarquee.com/slalom

For years, Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has been crafting eloquent correctives to Eurocentric and capitalist histories through acclaimed films like Lumumba (2000), I Am Not Your Negro (2016), and The Young Karl Marx (2017). His latest opus takes that project to its limit: Exterminate All the Brutes is a four-part HBO documentary series that retells the story of our world from a perspective rarely centered in such narratives—that of the colonized. Drawing from three books—Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist, which borrows its title from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; and Silencing the Past by Haitian-American scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot—Peck crafts a sweeping historical documentary that feels at once intimate and sweeping, familiar and new. In this episode of the podcast, Film Comment editor Devika Girish chatted at length with Peck about assembling this expansive series, confronting the gaps in colonial archives, and drawing continuities with the contemporary crises of fake news and historical amnesia. Listen to the full conversation and read an excerpt on filmcomment.com. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by: - MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment. - Amazon Studios, presenting Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and Time. Now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. For your consideration. Learn more at amazonstudiosguilds.com/films.

A few weeks ago, the British documentarian Adam Curtis debuted his newest mega-project online: a six-episode, eight-hour BBC series titled, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World. It's the latest in Curtis’s 30-year run of documentaries that stitch together found footage drawn largely from the BBC’s archives into epic origin stories of our political and cultural times. Available in its entirety on YouTube, Can’t Get You Out of My Head traces associative connections between a number of figures across history—including Jiang Qing, Michael X, Afeni and Tupac Shakur, Edouard Limonov, and others—to craft a dizzying account of the emergence of the global economy, the rise of individualism, and the spread of conspiracy theories. In this week's episode, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish debate Curtis’s aesthetic strategies and political arguments with two old friends: Film at Lincoln Center assistant programmer Dan Sullivan, and Violet Lucca, a former Film Comment editor (and the original host of this podcast!) who now works as web editor at Harper’s Magazine. They take on a number of questions in a lively, often impassioned conversation. Is Curtis a journalist, a filmmaker, or a propagandist? Who is the audience for his films? Do his grand theories hold water? And much more. For show notes, go to filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment.

On this week's episode, we bring back a beloved Film Comment Podcast format of yore: Movie Gifts. It’s like Secret Santa but for movies—each participant picks a movie for another that the recipient hasn’t seen. It’s a fun way for us to share our enthusiasms, gain new insights on old favorites, and fill in some long-standing blindspots.  And who better to join us in the spirit of gift-giving than our two erudite guests: K. Austin Collins, film critic for Rolling Stone; and Adam Nayman, writer for The Ringer, contributing editor to CinemaScope, and author of Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks. Kameron and Adam joined Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute to unwrap some fantastic presents, including Cinda Firestone's Attica, Allan King's Warrendale, Abbas Kiarostami's First Case, Second Case, and Elaine May's A New Leaf. For show notes, go to filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-the-return-of-movie-gifts. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment.