The Film Comment Podcast

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Fassbinder’s Eight Hours Don’t Make A Day Jun 04, 2017

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Did the golden age of television already happen? This episode of the podcast makes the case that it has—in 1970s Germany, courtesy of the one and only R.W. Fassbinder. In her feature in the May/June issue, Aliza Ma tackles Fassbinder’s recently restored and rediscovered Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, the nearly eight-hour series the auteur wrote and shot at a crucial moment in his career. The ensemble story involves the friends and family of a worker in a machine parts factory as he slowly mobilizes colleagues against the management. Ma writes: “With Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, Fassbinder channels his unique capacity for self-interrogation and curiosity about new social modes of existence into mass media, proving—at least for five episodes—that it is possible to create popular entertainment that manages to be multifaceted, provocative, and meaningful.” Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca was joined by Ma, head of programming at Metrograph, and Nick Pinkerton, regular FC contributor, to bask in the complexities and pleasures of this newly essential addition to the Fassbinder oeuvre.

Cannes 2017 Roundtable #2 May 30, 2017

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The agony and the ecstasy of festivalgoing continues on this week’s episode. In the second week of Cannes, two television shows by established auteurs—Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks—premiered, along with grittier indie fare, like Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here. Film Comment Editor Nicolas Rapold was joined by contributing editors Amy Taubin and Jonathan Romney, as well as Jordan Cronk, co-founder of the Locarno in Los Angeles Film Festival, to discuss the standouts and the failures.

Cannes 2017 Roundtable #1 May 23, 2017

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The dark of the theater and the sunny seafront come together but once a year at the Cannes Film Festival, and in this week's episode of the Film Comment Podcast, the critics weigh in live from the south of France on the slate's standouts, surprises, and offenses so far. Film Comment Editor Nicolas Rapold chats with a roundtable—namely Jordan Cronk, co-founder of the Locarno in Los Angeles Film Festival; Nicholas Elliott, New York correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma and contributing film editor for BOMB; and FC Contributing Editors Jonathan Romney and Amy Taubin—about the first week of screenings, including Claire Denis's Un beau soleil intérieur, Agnès Varda and JR's Visages Villages, Bong Joon-ho's Okja, Ruben Östlund's The Square, and Michael Haneke's Happy End.

Musicals! The Podcast May 16, 2017

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There's one alliterative movie musical that's dominated the recent conversational limelight, but less frequently discussed is how it operates within the genre. In this spirit, Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, uses La La Land as a starting point to delve into the form of the movie musical in his May/June Film Comment feature "Working It" As a second act, this week's episode of the FC podcast expands the sample set of movie musicals—each panelist brings in a favorite classic musical, as well as a newer musical that pushes the form forward—to look at a wider variety of global cinemas, performance techniques, and ways of deploying music in the narrative. To talk it over—and sing it out—FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca joins Koresky; Andrew Chan, Web Editor for the Criterion Collection; and Eric Hynes, Associate Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image.

1984 May 08, 2017

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Following a free screening of Michael Radford's adaptation of 1984 in early April as part of a nationwide event, Film Comment Editor Nicolas Rapold moderated a panel discussion about present-day doublespeak and dystopia. This week's episode of the FC podcast presents the conversation, which took place at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Using the film's aesthetics and narrative as a starting point, the panel—featuring critic and curator Ashley Clark; filmmaker Petra Epperlein, director of the Stasi documentary Karl Marx City; and New York Magazine book critic Christian Lorentzen—considers the Trump administration's manipulations of memory, motifs in modern dystopian literature and film, the role of media in public discourse in the UK and Russia, and how Orwell's original text resonates in 2017.

Movie Gifts May 02, 2017

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To celebrate the 55th birthday of our magazine, we present a special gift-giving episode of the podcast. The gifts in this case are movies: as in a Secret Snowflake office gift exchange, each critic gave two films to another participant that the recipient hadn’t seen before. One was a film that they’d be interested in hearing that person talk about; the other, a film that was just for fun. As you’ll hear, some gifts were more appreciated than others—but each of the viewings yielded a fascinating discussion. Along with Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca, the gift-givers/recipients included Michael Koresky, the Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Nick Pinkerton, regular contributor to Film Comment, and Aliza Ma, head of programming at Metrograph.

Art Of The Real 2017 Apr 26, 2017

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This week's episode of the Film Comment podcast takes a sonic journey through this year's edition of Art of the Real, which runs through May 2 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. First, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca speaks with AotR co-programmer Rachael Rakes about searching for formally daring new nonfiction work, as well as the preconceptions people bring to concepts like "film," "entertainment," and "art." Then, Lucca delves into the stylistic and structural intricacies of three festival selections—Patric Chiha's Brothers of the Night, Robinson Devor's Pow Wow, and Shengze Zhu's Another Year—to explore the range of techniques and stories on view. Reflecting on these films are Rakes; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Genevieve Yue, critic and assistant professor at the New School's Eugene Lang College.

John Waters Is on the Phone Apr 24, 2017

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On the occasion of Criterion Collection's home video release of Multiple Maniacs and the publication of his new book Make Trouble, Violet Lucca chats with John Waters—the director, writer, artist, sometime actor (most recently of FX's Feud: Bette and Joan), and Christmas card sender extraordinaire. Waters talks about the freedom of writing across multiple media, film critic Parker Tyler, his early days abusing zoom lenses and getting arrested for Mondo Trasho, and how his bad taste movement has been folded into the mainstream, from reality television to raunchy Hollywood comedies, to the current occupant of the White House. Waters called in from his home in Baltimore (where there's a special word tailor-made for the likes of Trump).

The Classical Apr 18, 2017

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James Gray's The Lost City of Z, which opened last Friday, charts a course into the jungle alongside a character in search of transcendence. Shot on gorgeous 35mm and masterfully structured, it crafts a fittingly sublime cinematic texture to evoke its protagonist's quest. It's not uncommon to come across criticism identifying Gray as a "classicist," but what exactly does "classical cinema" mean? This question guides the conversation in this week's episode of the Film Comment podcast, featuring Kent Jones, critic, filmmaker, and Director of the New York Film Festival; and Michael Koresky, the Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, who conducted a feature-length interview with Gray for our March/April issue. The discussion, moderated by FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca, touches on the nuances of the word "classical," the evolution of film grammar, the intersection of art and commerce, and other entries in Gray's singular body of work.

Terrence Malick Apr 11, 2017

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"You don't want something to look too staged in movies or they look overly presented. You don't know what comes out . . . You don't know what you have at the end of the day." That was Terrence Malick during a rare public appearance at SXSW last month, on the occasion of the premiere of the Austin, Texas–set Song to Song. Although the film nominally follows characters through the city’s music scene and features the likes of Patti Smith (for a few minutes) and John Lydon (for 10 seconds), it doesn't seek to document a milieu so much as evoke the breadth of human experience in all its tactility and transience. Needless to say, there's a lot to discuss, so this episode of The Film Comment Podcast thoughtfully considers Song to Song and Malick's artistic output. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca mulls it over with contributors Shonni Enelow, English professor at Fordham and author of Method Acting and Its Discontents, and Nick Pinkerton, member of the New York Film Critics Circle, in a conversation covering Malick's experimentation with free-associative forms, the 19th-century influence on his worldview, his depictions of gender, and how the critical discourse surrounding his work often reflects subtly different philosophies of art and criticism.

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