The Film Comment Podcast

Avant-garde cinema emerged in direct conversation with the film criticism that contextualized, championed, and critiqued it. Writing about work that is premised on defying formulaic intelligibility, and which invites us to reach beyond language to other modes of interpretation, can be both challenging and thrilling—requiring the critic to draw on a deep historical knowledge and a finely-tuned sensory awareness. And reading such criticism can be at once an eye-opening entryway into better appreciating experimental cinema, and its own creative encounter with connections across image and thought. On May 9, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sat down with Amy Taubin, Genevieve Yue, and Ayanna Dozier, some of the best critics of the avant-garde working today, to discuss the history of the craft, the nitty-gritty of this niche beat, what good writing on avant-garde cinema looks and sounds like, and what to even call the genre—avant-garde? Experimental? The other cinema? The talk took place at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in Downtown Manhattan as part of this year’s edition of Prismatic Ground, an exemplary and boundary-pushing festival dedicated to experimental documentary. Throughout the inspired conversation, the group referred to a few exemplary passages written by the esteemed panelists. Go to Film Comment's website to read: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-writing-about-avant-garde-cinema

Every year, Film at Lincoln Center honors a luminary of the film industry with the Chaplin Award. This year’s honoree is a beloved screen icon: the Dude, the Starman, the legend—Jeff Bridges. In advance of the 49th Chaplin Award Gala, taking place on April 29, Devika sat down with Bridges for a look back at the actor’s long career. Taking inspiration from a painting Bridges made many years ago, titled Jeff Makes a Decision, which depicts him as a stick figure navigating a river full of whirlpools, their conversation touched upon several of Bridges’s iconic roles—The Last Picture Show, Tron, Crazy Heart, and more—and how the actor ended up in those movies, often in spite of himself. Bridges also discussed the lasting influence his parents, both actors, have had on him; some of the crazy on-set stories behind his most memorable performances; and the television shows he is currently enjoying.

From the early ’70s onwards, Indian cinematographer Navroze Contractor—who passed away last year at age 80—blazed a trail of radical image-making. Trained in fine arts, photography, and cinematography, Contractor wielded the camera as a weapon and a paintbrush, capturing both the thrills and the throes of popular uprisings in films that defined political documentary in India, and giving stunning form to the bold adventures in fiction undertaken by India’s Parallel Cinema filmmakers. Last Monday, Film Comment presented a double-feature program of two films shot by the cinematographer—Mani Kaul’s rapturous Duvidha (1973), and Sanjiv Shah’s unique musical satire Love in the Time of Malaria (1992)—along with an extended conversation with Deepa Dhanraj, Contractor’s partner in life and work, with whom he founded the feminist Yugantar Film Collective in the 1980s. The talk, available today on the podcast, delves into the challenging and low-budget conditions that Duvidha was shot under, the influence of Indian miniature painting and still photography on its look, and Contractor’s extraordinary visual felicity with both documentary and fiction.

In his new book The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, Adam Shatz writes that, “The American poet Amiri Baraka described James Baldwin, who was born a year before Fanon, as ‘God’s Black revolutionary mouth.’ What Baldwin was for America, Fanon was for the world, especially the insurgent Third World, those subjects of European empires who had been denied what Edward Said called the ‘permission to narrate.’” Shatz’s book explores, in lucid detail, the complex life and thought of the Martinican psychiatrist and anticolonial theorist,  whose life was tragically cut short in 1961. Fanon’s epochal books Black Skin, White Mask and The Wretched of the Earth have long been a source of inspiration for politically minded filmmakers, including Med Hondo, Claire Denis, and many others. Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Adam on the podcast to talk about Fanon’s interest in cinema, filmmakers who’ve engaged the theorist’s works, and what exactly makes a movie “Fanonian.” In addition to films by Hondo and Denis, we talked about Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Antonioni’s The Passenger, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl, and more.

Christine Smallwood’s new book on Chantal Akerman’s Proust adaptation, La Captive, is, among many things, a meditation on the act of criticism. Published as part of The Decadent Editions series from Fireflies Press, this slim, pocket-sized volume takes Akerman’s year-2000 feature as a jumping-off point for an exploration of the great Belgian filmmaker’s monumental career and life, Marcel Proust’s autobiographical tendencies, and Smallwood’s own turbulent, pandemic-era homelife. Blending criticism, biography, and memoir, Smallwood beautifully shows how watching, reading, and writing are inextricable from lived experience. On today’s Podcast, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with the writer to talk about her book, the role of memory in their watching and reading, their favorite Akerman films, and, of course, La Captive itself: a brilliant, ambiguous, and Vertigo-inflected interpretation of what might be the most disturbing volume of In Search of Lost Time.

Last fall, director Bertrand Bonello’s latest, The Beast, was a thrilling highlight of the festival circuit. The film is a loose, two-and-a-half-hour, time-and-space-jumping adaptation of Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, in which a man refuses love believing that he is destined for a catastrophe. In The Beast, a woman named Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is thwarted in her quest for romance with Louis (George MacKay) across three different historical periods by multiple catastrophes: in 1910, by the Great Flood of Paris; in 2014, by incel culture; and in 2044, by a world dominated by artificial intelligence in which people are purified of their traumatic memories. All this spells doom for love. It’s an unpredictable and expansive film that brings together references from cinema, literature, art, and internet culture into a movie that feels classical in its construction and, at the same time, extremely contemporary in its subject matter and narrative twists—a vision of what it feels like to be alive today. And boy, is it creepy! On today’s Podcast, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish was joined by Bonello to talk about the film, which arrives in theaters on Friday, April 5.

Every spring the New Directors/New Films festival at Film at Lincoln Center and MoMA puts on an exciting showcase of movies by the best emerging filmmakers around the world. It’s always a reliable sign of the trends to come and the talents to look out for—past editions have featured early films by Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, Kelly Reichardt, and others. Over the past few years, Film Comment has established our own annual tradition of previewing the best movies in the New Directors/New Films lineup with local critics. This time around, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by Vadim Rizov (Filmmaker Magazine) and Alissa Wilkinson (The New York Times) for a rundown of some of the gems in the 2024 edition, including including A Good Place, Dreaming & Dying, The Day I Met You, Explanation for Everything, and more.

In our May-June 2020 issue, the scholar Aboubakar Sanogo wrote of Med Hondo, the late, great Mauritanian-French filmmaker: “For Hondo, decolonization and independence were not simply a matter of regime change from colonial to postcolonial, but rather a radical geopolitical and avant-gardist project. The cinema had its part to play in the realization of this emancipatory vision by liberating itself from all varieties of dominance, including those of form and tradition.” Hondo’s brilliant and idiosyncratic ouevre is a testament to that emancipatory vision. From his debut feature Soleil O to the grand anti-colonial musical West Indies; from the collaborative immigrant documentary My Neighbors to the anti-police noir Black Light, Hondo’s films are both formally ingenious and politically audacious. On March 22, Anthology Film Archives will kick off a weeklong retrospective of Hondo’s works, including some brand-new restorations. The series is organized by none other than Aboubakar Sanogo, who joined us on today’s episode to discuss Hondo’s life and legacy.

It’s once again that time of year: that’s right, the Academy Awards are just around the corner. Before the winners are revealed on Sunday, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute teamed up with some colleagues from Tinseltown—the editors of the Los Angeles Review of Books—to preview this year’s nominees. Eric Newman, editor-at-large at LARB, and Annie Berke, the publication’s Film & TV editor, joined us for a special collaboration with their podcast, the LARB Radio Hour. We had spirited debates about all the Best Picture nominees—from Oppenheimer to Killers of the Flower Moon to The Holdovers—and also talk about trends, surprises, and snubs. The Los Angeles Review of Books is a reader-supported online magazine and quarterly print journal that publishes incisive, rigorous, and engaging writing on contemporary literature and culture. If you’re interested in supporting their mission, consider becoming a member at lareviewofbooks.org/membership, where you can get access to LARB’s exclusive book club, featuring members-only chats with editors and luminary authors, in addition to a subscription to their quarterly journal.

The 2024 Berlinale wrapped up on Sunday, February 25, after a fortnight of buzzy premieres and fraught political controversies. The Film Comment crew was on the ground throughout the festival, reporting on each day’s goings-on via daily Podcasts, dispatches, interviews and more. On the final Friday of the festival, FC Editor Devika Girish gathered critics Jordan Cronk, Giovanni Marchini Camia, and Beatrice Loayza to discuss a last haul of films from the lineup—including Encounters prizewinner Direct Action, Generation 14plus prizewinner Who By Fire, Victor Kossakovsky’s Architecton, Kazik Radwanski’s Matt & Mara, Christine Angot’s A Family, and Travis Wilkerson’s Through the Graves the Wind Is Blowing. Catch up with all our other Berlinale coverage on filmcomment.com—there’s more coming this week!