The Film Comment Podcast

Taking a breath to look back, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Jonathan Romney, FC contributing editor, in an undisclosed garden location at the Venice Film Festival to discuss a few of the much-anticipated headliners: Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Laszlo Nemes’s Sunset, S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete, and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria.

This week on the podcast, the re-release of Terence Davies’s first full-length film, Distant Voices, Still Lives, in a new restoration, has our guests reminiscing about great debut features throughout cinema. After discussing Davies’s 1988 masterpiece, the group goes on to talk in detail about some great first features to careers that either took off or were frustratingly cut short, including a trio of Ter(r)ences and Lynne Littman. Joining in the discussion were frequent Film Comment contributors Ina Archer, media conservator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; Michael Koresky, the Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (and author of the University of Illinois Press book Terence Davies; and critic and FC contributing editor Nick Pinkerton.

This week on the podcast we head back to the summer of 2001. These days, the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop has become a way of life, though at the time that summer, we were blithely seeing movies without knowing what was to come. It was the year of Mulholland Drive but also of Rush Hour 2, a year of shifting gears into a new decade, and a formative time for many of us at the magazine. In our free and easy late-summer discussion, we’ve tried to capture what was special about the movies we were seeing at that moment, even though some of us can’t believe the movies we were seeing at that moment. For this trip down memory lane, I was joined by Aliza Ma, head programmer at Metrograph in New York, and Michael Koresky, the editorial and creative director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

With a playful 13.5-hour multigenre film-of-films from Mariano Llinas, an ultra-sharp new Hong Sangsoo, and an array of other experiments, the Locarno Festival this year maintained its position as a reliable source of vitality in the cinematic landscape. The 71st edition also marked an end of an era, in one respect at least, as artistic director Carlo Chatrian will be moving on to the coveted top post at the Berlinale. But there was plenty to talk about in the stimulating lineup, which has a way of trickling into other festivals of note in the coming year: already, Ray & Liz, La Flor, and Too Old to Die Young have been announced in the main slate of the New York Film Festival. In Locarno, I discussed the films on offer with regular FC contributor Jordan Cronk, founder/director of Acropolis and Locarno in Los Angeles, and one of the Locarno Critics Academy participants, Becca Voelcker, a PhD student in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University and freelance film critic and programmer.

Our cover story for the July/August issue is about Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman—a story about incredible events in America’s past that feel well-suited to our incredible present.  “In a case where the events of history improve upon the fantasies of fiction, BlacKkKlansman, the latest Spike Lee joint, is based on the 2014 memoir written by Ron Stallworth, a black undercover police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1979,” Teo Bugbee writes in her feature. “However, Lee does not get lost in the details of Stallworth’s life story, and BlacKkKlansman is no straight biopic. Instead, it follows the beats of a traditional cop movie, where a man of the law is torn between allegiances in his efforts to solve a case. In this regard, the film represents the latest chapter in the underrated career of Spike Lee, genre filmmaker.” For this episode, I joined Bugbee and Ashley Clark of BAMcinématek to discuss Lee’s wide-ranging, and chronically misunderstood, career.

As long as we are being inundated with worrisome news about Russian cyberwarfare and other attacks, the time seems ripe for taking a look at the motherland’s cinema. The summer series “Putin’s Russia: A 21st-Century Mosaic” at the Museum of the Moving Image provided a perfect opportunity for surveying key films in the country’s recent history, including award-winning auteurs like Andrei Zvyagintsev and lesser-known directors. For this discussion I was joined by the co-programmers of the series: Eric Hynes, curator of film at Museum of Moving Image and FC columnist, and writer/filmmaker Daniel Witkin.

On July 17, our latest Film Comment Free Talk brought together Boots Riley, director of the mind-altering new film Sorry to Bother You, and special guest Questlove at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “All art is political,” said Riley, who detailed the genesis of the movie’s surreal Marxist story of a African-American telemarketer, and traded stories with Questlove about the nitty-gritty of the creative process. The talk was moderated by filmmaker and Film Comment contributor Farihah Zaman. For more on Sorry to Bother You, don’t miss Ina Diane Archer’s essay in the July/August issue and our podcast discussion from July 4. Our next Film Comment Free Talk takes place on August 6 with Crystal Moselle, the director of Skate Kitchen (and The Wolfpack).

“In just a few years’ time, they’ve become both requisite filmmaking tools and regrettable freighters of cliché. Drone shots are easily recognizable not because drone cameras have a single, easily definable use, but because nearly everyone’s using them the same way: god’s-eye view of a landscape, smooth gliding (heaven forbid there’s a jerk or rattle), low-grade wow factor, cut,” Eric Hynes writes in his essay about drones in the July/August issue of Film Comment. “Yet perhaps we shouldn’t blame the tool for how it’s being used, especially since we’re still in the early days, and since potential applications are still being explored within both documentary and fiction.” There’s great potential in drone photography, for sure, but how are filmmakers harnessing its power for good, and not just for awesome? In this week’s Film Comment Podcast, I discussed drones in cinema with Hynes, an FC columnist and Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image, and a bona fide cinematographer, Ashley Connor (Madeline’s Madeline), and hashed out the good, the bad, and the ugly of this curious airborne invention.

“Audiences will enjoy Sorry to Bother You in one go, but the film invites and can stand up to multiple viewings, in much the same way that complex rap lyrics benefit from repeated plays and familiarity gained from memorization,” Ina Diane Archer writes in our July/August issue. “Boots Riley is, by his own definition, a storyteller—a socially conscious, political artist, communist, proud Oaklander, and the beloved front man of The Coup.” Riley’s scabrous satire tracks a telemarketer (Lakeith Stanfield) on the rise in a company engaged in some nefarious labor practices that bring corporate malfeasance into a surreal realm. For our latest episode, Archer joined me in a discussion of the feature and the many layers she unpacks in her essay.

For many New York moviegoers, the past few weeks at the Film Society of Lincoln Center have virtually belonged to Luchino Visconti. The retrospective has included established landmarks such as Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard, Death in Venice, and Ossessione, but it’s also fostered rediscovery of Ludwig, The Stranger, The Damned, and more. The record audiences suggest that Visconti’s richly drawn canvases, larger-than-life characers, and sweeping historical dramas still have a special pull on the big screen. And decay never looked so good. In this episode of the podcast, I talked about Visconti’s work (and its resonance with glam rock?) with regular FC contributor Nick Pinkerton, and Florence Almozini, associate director of programming at the Film Society and co-programmer of the retrospective.