The Film Comment Podcast

In May, we premiered our very first gift-giving episode. In it, each critic chose two films for another participant to experience for the first time. The first was a film that they’d be interested in hearing that person talk about; the second was a film that they thought the other might genuinely like. It didn’t always work out that way, though. To continue the tradition, we offer a very special gift-giving episode in reverse order, and our resulting conversation runs the gamut from Andrew Dice Clay to Stephen Chow to Barbra Streisand. As you’ll hear, sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish which film was intended to amuse and which aimed to abuse, but each gift gave way to surprising appreciation and lively conversation. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Michael Koresky, Editorial Director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Nick Pinkerton, regular contributor to Film Comment, and Aliza Ma, Head of Programming at Metrograph.

Reducing Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama to a straightforward psychological reading barely scratches the surface—which is exactly what makes the film a productive starting point for this week’s Film Comment Podcast. When setting out to make a film depicting terrorism, filmmakers must thoughtfully parse out aesthetic choices about narrative tone and character intentionality, while also being mindful of the potential impact of historical memory. FC Digital Editor Violet Lucca is joined by Aliza Ma, head programmer at Metrograph, and Jeff Reichert, filmmaker and co-editor of Reverse Shot, to look at a few specific approaches spanning national and historical contexts—a varied sample set, from Olivier Assayas to Paul Greengrass to Japanese director Kazuhiko Hasegawa.

In memory of Jeanne Moreau (1928-2017), this week’s podcast offers up a selection of previously unreleased interviews with the legendary actress and director. Writer Andréa R. Vaucher takes us through her series of conversations with Moreau—her first being an interview published in Film Comment (March/April 1990)—in which she shares Moreau’s stories and philosophies of acting and directing, Truffaut and Friedkin, the French New Wave and the sexual revolution, and even Orson Welles’s The Deep. A Words & Deeds production; produced, engineered, and directed by David Bloom. Read the original interview here: https://www.filmcomment.com/article/interview-jeanne-moreau/

“What holds the movies of 1977 together beyond a coincidence of the calendar?” asks J.D. Connor, writing on the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s ’77 series, which runs through August 24. “Is there something in the zeitgeist animating both Suspiria and Smokey and the Bandit? Slap Shot and Ceddo? Killer of Sheep and The Car? Probably not. But they might be held together in more abstract ways…range widely enough and you will also gain a sense of what the aesthetic limits of cinema were, what enforced them, and where the energy to bust them apart was coming from.” In the spirit of the episode from last summer that returned to the summer of ’66, here we look back on Connor’s “coincidence of the calendar,” which produced the cinema of 1977. Maitland McDonagh, author of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento and publisher of 120 Days Books, shares her memories of moviegoing in seventies Times Square and shares her insights on horror classics that premiered in ’77, including The Hills Have Eyes, Suspiria, and Exorcist II: The Heretic. She’s joined by longtime Film Comment contributor Margaret Barton-Fumo, editor of Paul Verhoeven: Interviews, and FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca for a conversation that also touches on The American Friend, Sorcerer, and 3 Women . . . and speculates on the appeal of the year’s top-grossing film, Star Wars.

“Championed by Annette Michelson, B. Ruby Rich, and many others, [Yvonne] Rainer’s films are densely verbose, elusive, dryly comic, furious, fractured, and intimately concerned with addressing a variety of injustices beyond the concerns of feminism, from ageism to gentrification to mental illness,” writes Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca in her July/August print feature “Moving Beyond.” “Each work turns received notions of form and feminist praxis on their heads, talking out solutions to (or just expressing frustration at) extremely large problems, and using anecdotes to illustrate how desire and power influence all aspects of our lives.” On the occasion of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of her films, Rainer, 82, joined Lucca for a conversation ranging across her varied and dynamic career—her choreography and radical dance work, her cinema’s aesthetic approaches to examining privilege, and her interactions with second- and third-wave feminist circles.

As Eric Hynes wrote in the cover story of our July/August issue, “At their best, the Safdies’ films don’t just mooch off the city’s story surplus—they also feed into it, contributing truly odd, activated extensions of urban life.” Their latest, Good Time, is no exception. In conversation with their lead actor Robert Pattinson, co-writer Ronald Bronstein, and Film Comment editor Nicolas Rapold at a special sneak preview, the filmmakers delineate and riff on the alchemic creation of a criminal anti-hero. Actively engaged in their native New York’s alternate (and everyday) realities, the Safdie Brothers trace the six-year long journey from the conception of to the making of Good Time—from a first encounter with Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song and binge-watched episodes of Cops to news of Richard Matt and David Sweat’s prison-break and the initial hard-core-addict look of Pattinson’s character.

Plenty of films open with an establishing shot of a city's iconic skyline, or of a few iconic barns, only to go on and use the location as an anonymous backdrop. But few and far between are films that actually use the specificity that comes from location shooting to express something about the city's history, the characters, and the story itself. The cover story of our July/August issue is the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time—a New York film through and through—and in the same issue’s Art and Craft column, we asked veteran location manager Ken Lavet to reflect on the art of scouting for Steven Soderbergh and other filmmakers. "It always starts with the story—whether it's in a beat sheet form or a script or a treatment of some kind,” Lavet writes. “Hopefully I get some description from the screenwriter—of, say, a house, or an apartment building, or an office. And I start looking with that in mind." In this episode, Film Comment contributors Nick Pinkerton, Eric Hynes, and Margaret Barton-Fumo join Digital Producer Violet Lucca to discuss a film shot in their hometown, and access how each film interfaces with their lived experience of those places.

As David Thomson succinctly puts it in the July/August issue, "Wanda is the kind of person who didn’t and still doesn’t get into American movies (unless she’s got a few dollars for a ticket)." Based on a newspaper story about a woman convicted of robbery who thanked the judge for sentencing her to jail for 20 years, Wanda is an unapologetic look at life in America's coal country starring its director and writer, Barbara Loden. Still relatively hard to see, the 1970 film has experienced a(nother) recent critical resurgence thanks in part to Nathalie Léger's book about the film, which charts the writer’s quest to discover more about Loden's life and the soul-searching that ensues. In this episode, Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Shonni Enelow, author of Method Acting and Its Discontent, and regular FC contributors Nick Pinkerton and Margaret Barton-Fumo.

What do we talk about when we talk about independent film? At various points it’s referred to a freedom of style, or it’s been shorthand for a low-budget film outside of the studio system. In his Cannes coverage, Kent Jones cites Larry Gross’s prophetic declaration that independent film would go from an “actual economic position within the film industry to pure marketing speak.” Nevertheless, filmmakers across the country (yes, in between L.A. and New York!) are still making films with humor and velocity, even, maybe especially, as the cultural and economic conditions become ever more precarious. Rather than retrace the well-trod mythology of independent film history, the contributors to this episode of The Film Comment Podcast have selected a few contemporary independent filmmakers—from Anna Biller to the Safdie Brothers—and some favorite practitioners from years past. Participants: Nellie Killian, Senior Programmer at BAMcinématek; Gina Telaroli, filmmaker, critic, and archivist; Violet Lucca, digital producer at Film Comment; and Nicolas Rapold, Editor of Film Comment.

We expect that discrete scenes will play off of one another to create any given feature film, but what happens when one of these moments tugs the narrative in an unexpected direction? Sometimes the moment works, and sometimes it doesn’t—and in the context of a bad film, the misfires might even indicate the possibility of a better film lurking within. There’s also a certain how-did-this-happen fascination in finding a truly awful moment in an otherwise excellent film, suggesting that—surprise—perhaps art isn’t a matter of perfection. This week’s episode of The Film Comment Podcast considers these moments of dissonance and what alternate narrative realities and artistic impulses they might indicate… for better or for worse. To ruminate on these nuances, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca asks this week’s participants—Ashley Clark, programmer and FC contributor; Shonni Enelow, author of Method Acting and Its Discontents; and Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center—to bring in case studies of good scenes in bad films and bad scenes in good films.