The Film Comment Podcast

With the ostensible arrival of spring comes the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA’s New Directors/New Films. In this year’s crop the traditions of various genres and national cinemas plays out in often spectacular fashion, as well as up-close-and-personal narratives. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Nicolas Rapold, FC Editor-in-Chief, and Devika Girish, contributor to the magazine, to reflect on those films that caught their eyes, including Our House, Closeness, Good Manners, The Great Buddha +, and more.

Just in time for Easter (and a new series celebrating Al Pacino at The Quad), this episode honors an often-misunderstood subcategory of star: hams. Ranging from the amusing to glorious to cringeworthy, these actors call attention to themselves in ways that can overtake and redefine the films they’re performing in. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Ashley Clark, senior programmer of cinema at BAM, and Michael Koresky, editorial director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, to chew over these over-the-top performers who produce a certain joy that a subtler actor can’t. From cops pontificating about posteriors in Heat to Maine put-down artists in Dolores Claiborne, this gammon-fueled chat is one for the ages.

In the March/April issue of Film Comment, Lauren Kaminsky wrote about Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin: "a delirious historical mash-up that compiles sometimes independently factual details in utterly counterfactual ways. It can therefore convey nothing about causation and is largely apolitical, but it is a spot-on satire of socialist realism and the authoritarian political culture of high Stalinism.” In our digital age, the prominence of news satire and satirical news has helped make politics more immediate—Iannucci being a prime mover through work like In the Loop and Veep—but the intermingling of humor and facts brings its own complications. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca spoke with Kaminsky about the Russian humor this film exerts within the context of Anglo-American satire of today’s political events.

All too often, women’s opinions are considered valuable only in certain situations: when there’s a problem affecting women, when there’s an opportunity to market to women, when there’s a president that is a deeply reactionary sexual predator. Nellie Killian’s series “Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories” attempts to show the multitude of experiences and issues that come to light when a director takes the simple but radical step of having a woman tell her story to the camera. Spanning several decades as well as a variety of lengths, the 34 films in the series open up a free space for discussion of how issues of class, race, immigration, violence, crime, sex, or “just” being a housewife affect women. Interspersing clips from the films, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca speaks with Killian, who is also a contributing editor to FC; Farihah Zaman, filmmaker (Remote Area Medical), critic, and Field of Vision Production Manager; and Sierra Pettengill, filmmaker (The Reagan Show) and occasional contributor to Frieze magazine. Films discussed: Soft Fiction, Janie’s Janie, The Women’s Film, Mimi, Suzanne Suzanne, Audience

Featuring the talents of Bill Gunn (Ganja & Hess), Vertamae Grosvenor (Daughters of the Dust), Ishmael Reed, and many others, Personal Problems was originally intended as “an experimental soap opera” for WNET, the public broadcast station in New York. It never aired and was thought lost for many years, but the film has been newly restored by Kino Lorber and will be traveling theatrically soon, beginning with a run at Metrograph. Written by Ishmael Reed and shot in 1979, Personal Problems stars Vertamae Grosvenor as Johnnie Mae, a nurse’s aide at Harlem Hospital who’s having an affair behind the back of her uptight transit worker husband Charles (Walter Cotton). In the March/April 2018 issue, Howard Hampton writes about this incredible work, a “motion picture [that] is inventing its language as it goes along—a series of building blocks of different shapes, tones, and materials creating a homemade Cubist mosaic. Personal Problems balances hands-on and hands-off approaches.” Tobi Haslett, contributor to N+1, 4Columns, and The New Yorker, speaks with FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca about this distinctive work.

From the way in which the experiences of African Americans are portrayed on screen, to the way skin color is captured on film, the history of movies and photography is inextricable from race. How do nonwhite, nonmale filmmakers create a language that equalizes a subject? What sort of language and historical practices are required to reflect these perspectives? In this live discussion at Film Comment Selects titled “Race and Representation,” Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold discusses these questions with Antonio Méndez Esparza, director of Life and Nothing More (the opening night film of the series), RaMell Ross, director of Hale County This Morning, This Evening (winner of a prize at Sundance), and Professor Racquel Gates, author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture.

Valeska Grisebach’s extremely precise yet highly naturalistic films take years to make: so far, we have been graced with only three features. In the January/February issue of Film Comment, Haden Guest discusses Grisebach’s process of “radical observation,” as well as her relationship to existing genre forms and aesthetics. Western, Grisebach’s latest film, follows a group of German workers building a hydroelectric plant in the backlands of Bulgaria. Separated by linguistic and cultural differences, one of the German workers—Meinhard—slowly begins to bridge the gap between the two camps. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Film Society of Lincoln Center programmers Dennis Lim and Dan Sullivan and Brooklyn Rail film section co-editor Leo Goldsmith to discuss the film, Grisebach’s filmography, and her relationship to new forms of realism.

After being notorious as a “hotbed” of piracy for many years, the Chinese market is now more rightly regarded as the second-largest in the world. In the January/February issue of Film Comment, Nick Pinkerton and Andrew Chan respectively report on Hollywood’s deals with mainland multiplexes and aspiring mogul Jia Zhangke. As the middle class has grown, new venues and festivals seek to satiate their desire for more entertainment options—big, small, or somewhere in-between. In this episode of the podcast, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Andrew Chan, web editor at the Criterion Collection, and Aliza Ma, head programmer at Metrograph, to discuss Chinese film culture, sprawling multiplexes, censorship, and the types of films that do and don’t get made anymore on the Mainland and off. Read Andrew’s feature online: https://www.filmcomment.com/article/jia-zhangke-pingyao-film-festival/

Recent episodes of The Film Comment Podcast have contemplated formative filmmaker obsessions, but what about the movies that struck us much earlier in life? Maybe your parents took you to see it, maybe you flipped by it on cable and couldn’t change the channel, or maybe you had a traumatic brush with the body horror of The Blob too early in life…whatever it is, we revisit our childhood fascinations on this week’s episode, giving us an occasion to reflect on how our tastes and critical faculties might begin to form at a young age, as well as what happens when beloved films may not withstand the test of time. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by K. Austin Collins, staff writer for The Ringer; Nicholas Elliott, U.S. correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma; and Mark Harris, regular contributor to Vulture and the author of FC’s 2017 column “Cinema ‘67 Revisited.”

One of the most curious entries at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (which runs January 24 to February 4) isn’t a film at all, but a new one-off project by Apichatpong Weerasethakul: SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL. True to the title, this is a fully operational hotel, conceived and designed by Apichatpong in tandem with IFFR curator Edwin Carels and a team of collaborators. Over the festival’s first five nights, guests could reserve (for a 75-euro fee) one of six beds, which are tiered within a tall metal scaffold and flanked by a wall-sized circular screen projecting assorted found footage courtesy of the nearby EYE Filmmuseum and The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Complete with bedside tables, lamps, and other accoutrements of a typical hotel—not to mention a fully stocked bar, breakfast options, and a balcony for public viewing—SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL fosters the sleep states so frequently conjured and portrayed in Apichatpong’s films. Film Comment was joined by Apichatpong at the exhibition on its final day to discuss how this unique project came to be, the influences behind the look and feel of the hotel, and how dreams function as a very particular and personal form of cinema.