The Film Comment Podcast

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/

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.