The Film Comment Podcast

“Although religious symbols and themes have often found their way into Schrader’s film work, First Reformedmarks the first time he has applied elements of transcendental style—as extolled in his seminal book Transcendental Style in Film—to his own filmmaking. Early in his career, Schrader was occupied with exploring the pathological lure of sex and violence in narrative cinema,” Aliza Ma wrote in her review of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed for our May/June issue. As part of our Film Comment Free Talks series, Schrader joined Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold for a conversation about the twists and turns and leaps in the writer-director’s career—from starting out as a critic and UCLA film student in the ’60s, to writing screenplays for Taxi Driver and Last Temptation of Christ, to directing films from Blue Collar through First Reformed. This week’s podcast captures the discussion. (Please note: the audio is at times slightly imperfect due to an unforeseeable technical snafu.) Looking ahead, our Film Comment Free Talks continue on July 17 with filmmaker Boots Riley, director of the much-anticipated satire Sorry to Bother You, starring Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson.

This summer we kicked off our Film Comment Free Talks, a new series of conversations with filmmakers held at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. For the release of horror sensation Hereditary, we invited the film’s director, Ari Aster, to come for a wide-ranging chat. The talk was moderated by FSLC Editorial Director Michael Koresky, who wrote of Hereditary in our May/June issue: “We are compelled by our family stories, but they are often constructed narratives, given to biases, subjectivities, fictions. If at times Hereditary feels more like an askew domestic melodrama than a horror movie, that’s not accidental.” Aster talks about his love of Ingmar Bergman, his fear of The Wiz, his next project, and the arduous road to staging a scene just so. Our next Film Comment Free Talk will take place on July 17 with director Boots Riley where he'll discuss his funny, scathing, weird, and audacious satire Sorry to Bother You.

In the May/June issue of Film Comment, Nick Pinkerton wrote: “Like few feature films before it, Spielberg’s [Ready Player One] exemplifies an aesthetic of pop-culture decoupage that has developed, in recognizably kindred forms, across a wide range of media, one that has been increasingly prevalent through the early years of the 21st century. It is that of the junk-pile jumble of accumulated mass-manufactured character properties at the end of pop history—the aesthetic of glut.” Pinkerton, regular FC contributor, is joined by FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca and Light Industry co-founder and 4Columns contributor Ed Halter to discuss our new pop culture reality, where everything—good or bad—is here to stay.

In his essay “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic”—first published in the January/February 1978 issue of Film Comment—Robin Wood wrote: “Critics are not, of course, supposed to talk personally. It is regarded as an embarrassment, as bad taste, and besides it is an affront to the famous ideal of ‘objectivity.’ . . . Yet I believe there will always be a close connection between critical theory, critical practice, and personal life; and it seems important that the critic should be aware of the personal bias that must inevitably affect his choice of theoretical position, and prepared to foreground it in his work.” Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, invoked this landmark essay during a talk at the RiverRun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was joined by K. Austin Collins, critic at Vanity Fair, and filmmaker and critic Farihah Zaman. Addressing representation in recent films like Love, Simon and Call Me by Your Name, the process of identification, and the absence of sexuality in the Marvel universe, their conversation is an earnest and thoughtful consideration of movie-viewing while queer.

In this unbelievable season finale, promises are broken, insults fly, and lives are forever changed…well, not really. New York Times co-chief film critic Manohla Dargis joins FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold in this final Cannes 2018 episode to discuss Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, snipers, Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, why auteur love should stick around a bit longer, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree, interviewing Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noe’s Climax, and what it means to attend the festival.

It’s been a full 10 days of Cannes! FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Eugene Hernandez, Deputy Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and co-publisher of Film Comment, to discuss four films that show how unforgiving life can be: Nadine Labaki’s Capernaüm, Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Ayka, Matteo Garrone’s Dogman, and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. The duo consider the effectiveness and strategies each filmmaker uses to depict such harsh realities.

It’s Cannes, day nine! FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Justin Chang, film critic for the Los Angeles Times; Mara Gourd-Mercado, general director of Montreal doc-fest RIDM; and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and film programmer at the Museum of the Moving Image. The writers and programmers discuss David Robert Mitchell’s California pop-culture noir pastiche Under the Silver Lake; Lee Chang-dong’s Haruki Murakami adaptation Burning; Alice Rohrwacher’s magical realist family farm drama Lazzaro felice; Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s ironic psychosexual melodrama Diamantino; and Laetitia Carton’s documentary Le Grand Bal.

In this episode, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Amy Taubin, Jonathan Romney, and Eric Hynes to discuss Lars von Trier’s “provocative” The House That Jack Built and Spike Lee’s provocative BlackKklansman. The writers also discuss Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II, and the latest Stéphane Brizé & Vincent Lindon collaboration, At War.

In today’s dispatch, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Eric Hynes, curator of film at Museum of Moving Image, and Orwa Nyrabia, artistic director of the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), to talk about all things documentary at Cannes. They discuss Wang Bing’s bold and boundary-pushing eight-hour Dead Souls, the place (or lack thereof) for nonfiction cinema at the Croisette, and the influence of fake news frenzy on documentary filmmaking today.

Following the high-profile “82 women” red carpet protest, FC and Artforum contributing editor Amy Taubin joins FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold to discuss the festival’s failure to find (good) films by female directors. Plus: Jafar Panahi’s Three Faces; Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun; Vanessa Filho’s Angel Face; Alejandro Fadel’s Die, Monster, Die; Lukas Dhont’s Girl; and more thoughts about Godard’s The Image Book.