The Film Comment Podcast

Have we passed 100 episodes already? Apparently so! This week, we invite listeners to look back at some of the most memorable moments of The Film Comment Podcast, including choice blurts from Kent Jones, Amy Taubin, Maitland McDonagh, Molly Haskell, Nick Pinkerton, and other special guests. We also look forward with FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca’s interview with Ruben Östlund about The Square, what it means to be Swedish, and the power of YouTube.

This Halloween, The Film Comment Podcast salutes a filmmaker whose work, according to the British Board of Film Classification, exemplified the “pornography of terror.” The panel—Ina Archer, media conservation and digitization assistant at the Smithsonian National African-American Museum of History and Culture; Margaret Barton-Fumo, longtime FC contributor and editor of Paul Verhoeven: Interviews; and Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center—convenes to remember the eclectic body of work of Tobe Hooper, who passed away earlier this year. Pick your poison, whether it’s television static, or carnivorous crocodiles, or Stephen King miniseries, or meat hooks… and don’t get us started on Lifeforce. As always, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca moderates the conversation.

Premiered in Venice and recently screened in the New York Film Festival, Zama marks not only the long-awaited return of Lucrecia Martel, but also her first literary adaptation. Martel expanded on the first-person fever dream of the original 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, whose fans included Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar. This week’s episode of The Film Comment Podcast ruminates on Zama’s novelistic origins with the help of literary translator and CUNY professor Esther Allen, who produced the first English translation of Zama in 2016, for which she won the 2017 National Translation Award in Prose. Allen is joined by Dennis Lim, Director of Programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Violet Lucca, FC Digital Producer and podcast host, to discuss the subconscious presences Martel might imply beyond the edges of her frames.

Armando Iannucci has long had a genius for the absurdity of global politics, from his work on the satirical news program On the Hour in the 1990s, to the British ministry antics of The Thick of It, to his HBO series Veep. But his new film, The Death of Stalin, set amidst the immediate and ridiculous aftermath of the Soviet leader’s death in 1953, comes at a time when the political situation in America and abroad has become all too absurd. Iannucci discusses the current presidential administration, as well as the way in which humor can naturally arise from terror, in this bonus episode of The Film Comment Podcast. The Death of Stalin opens today in the U.K. and will be released in the U.S. early next year by IFC Films.

At the conclusion of the 55th New York Film Festival, Film Comment gathered together a panel of contributors and critics for one final live roundtable. For this “Festival Wrap” talk, the critics discussed festival favorites and curiosities, including films by Lucrecia Martel, Claire Denis, Ruben Östlund, Valeska Grisebach, and more. The critics weighing in this time around are Nellie Killian, programmer and Film Comment contributing editor; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Aliza Ma, head of programming at Metrograph; and Wesley Morris, critic-at-large for the New York Times. As always, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca moderates and shares her thoughts.

In this special live episode of the podcast, moderated by Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold, panelists Teo Bugbee (The New York Times contributor), writer-programmer Ashley Clark (BAMcinématek), and writer-filmmaker Farihah Zaman (Field of Vision) discuss how cinematic technique is used to reflect nonwhite perspectives and stories of immigration, and what is different about the latest generation of storytelling.

Looking ahead to the New York Film Festival premiere of Susan Lacy’s documentary Spielberg, this week’s Film Comment podcast considers the household-name auteur: the architect of the modern blockbuster, and a surviving (and thriving) master of the Classical Hollywood vernacular. Molly Haskell is on hand to impart wisdom from her most recent book Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films, which came out in the spring, as well as firsthand recollections of writing about Spielberg in the age of second-wave feminism. She joins Film Society of Lincoln Center Editorial Director Michael Koresky, who edited the Reverse Shot book Steven Spielberg: Nostalgia and the Light, published with Museum of the Moving Image this summer, and FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca for a discussion spanning Spielberg’s big marquee titles and his less appreciated works.

This week, The Film Comment Podcast hosts a very special guest, himself a choreographer of uninvited guests on their worst behavior. A longtime practitioners of his own strain of emotional extremity, Darren Aronofsky sat for an interview to discuss his new film mother! with FC Editor Nicolas Rapold. Instead of allegorical exegesis, the conversation covers the film’s technical craft and its intense subjectivity, as well as what Aronofsky learned from his college professor…Miklós Jancsó. You can listen below, as long as you don’t overstay your welcome and dislodge an unbraced sink.

The centerpiece retrospective of this year’s New York Film Festival celebrates the centenary of Robert Mitchum, paragon of fatalist cool. In her September/October ’17 Film Comment feature “Running Deep,” Imogen Sara Smith observes that Mitchum’s acting “goes on under the surface: amusement, sadness, anger, or banked-down warmth seep through his face the way coals glow through a layer of ash when you blow on them. To think of him ‘accessing emotion’ or ‘creating a character’ feels wrong.” This week, each critic—Smith, NYFF Director and Mitchum retrospective co-programmer Kent Jones, and FC Editorial Assistant and frequent TCM Diarist Steven Mears—brings in a Mitchum performance to delve into. Even if Mitchum self-deprecatingly claimed that he favored the Smirnoff method over Stanislavski, every example deepens our sense of the creative skill set that he kept close to the vest throughout his career. As always, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca hosts and moderates.

This week’s Film Comment podcast requires very little introduction beyond the topic—Twin Peaks: The Return, a work that is both a heartfelt refraction of David Lynch’s 50 years of creative output and a medium-reshaping beast unto itself. But rather than presume that 45 minutes is enough time to hone in on any single airtight interpretation (or that it would be any fun to do so), the goal is to strike an analytical balance, seeking useful context while allowing the dream to remain a dream. From some subconscious alcove above a convenience store, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca speaks with Dennis Lim, Director of Programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and author of David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, about Lynch and the recent 18-episode run.