The Film Comment Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Comedy Today Apr 05, 2017

Show notes

In a March/April 2017 feature titled "No Joke," Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca traces current trends in modern American comedies to the pressures of globalization and the rise of the internet. "The specificity of wordplay and sociological observation—two things that non-silent comedy thrives on—is therefore diminished or omitted to ensure its international portability," Lucca explains. "Remakes and adaptations of successful, preexisting intellectual property are nothing new—they have been part and parcel of Hollywood since its inception. However, as the media scholar Mark Fisher suggested, 'capitalist realism' resigns us to this repetition by telling audiences that we are in crisis mode and there’s no time to think about anything outside of the current system: Hollywood really is out of ideas this time, so just get used to it. It is the seventh art acknowledging its marginalized state and throwing up its hands." This episode of The Film Comment Podcast focuses on the past six to eight years of American film comedy but also puts it in dialogue with TV and the history of the genre. What actually makes us laugh, and what do comedies reflect about our culture? What's the right balance to strike between comic digressions and plot motion? And what is a Harold? To talk about these topics—as well as the magical alchemy of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly—Lucca sat down with Michael Delaney, senior instructor at New York improv institution Upright Citizens Brigade and an actor whose credits include The Other Guys, Veep, and Curb Your Enthusiasm; and Robert Sweeney, producer at Kino Lorber and contributor to FC and FilmStruck.

New Directors / New Films 2017 + Albert Serra Mar 28, 2017

Show notes

This week's episode of the Film Comment podcast begins with an interview with the irrepressible Albert Serra, director of our March/April cover film The Death of Louis XIV, which opens this Friday. Then we move on to the annual New Directors/New Films series, which wrapped this past weekend. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca speaks with two members of the ND/NF selection committee—La Frances Hui, Associate Curator of Film at MoMA, and Dennis Lim, Director of Programming at Film Society of Lincoln Center—about what they look for when scouting for new filmmaking voices, as well as the process of crafting a well-rounded festival slate. They are joined by Nicholas Elliott, the New York correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma and Contributing Film Editor for BOMB, in a detailed look at ND/NF films such as Arábia, The Challenge, and The Future Perfect that defy labels.

Coming Of Age Horror Mar 21, 2017

Show notes

Horror films are unusually adept at giving mutable flesh to the terrors of adolescence, and Julia Ducournau's new film Raw is no exception. After a choice freshman-year hazing ritual involving a rabbit liver, the veterinary-school protagonist of Raw finds herself developing a taste for raw flesh, which she processes as she adjusts to life at school. Metaphorical monsters and latent taboo impulses like these are to be expected when it comes to horror-movie growing pains, and so this episode of The Film Comment Podcast revisits a few classics of coming-of-age horror. Pig's blood, werewolves, and the Eraserhead baby all appear in this conversation, featuring frequent FC contributors Margaret Barton-Fumo, editor of Paul Verhoeven: Interviews and author of a feature on Raw in the March/April issue; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Nick Pinkerton, member of the New York Film Critics Circle; and Violet Lucca, FC Digital Producer and podcast moderator.

Live From True False 2017 Mar 15, 2017

Show notes

The True/False Film Fest in Columbia, Missouri, reliably assembles a selection of the world’s finest nonfiction film, tracking down surprises from smaller festivals across the globe and picking highlights from Sundance. This year, Film Comment traveled to Columbia for a long weekend of documentary and essay film—and hosted a festival recap at the festival’s traditional closing-night spot, a waffle bar that doubles as a music venue. This special live edition of the Film Comment podcast features the critics Ela Bittencourt, a selection committee member for It's All True International Film Festival; Jordan Cronk, founder of the Acropolis Cinema in Los Angeles and co-founder of the Locarno in Los Angeles Film Festival; Aliza Ma, Head of Programming at Metrograph; and Nicolas Rapold, Editor of Film Comment. And, thanks to the open audience format of the event, a couple of filmmakers from the festival join the conversation to discuss the emotionally intimate work of editing and shooting documentary: Shevaun Mizrahi, director of Distant Constellation, about an Istanbul old folks home; and Sompot Chidgasornpongse, director of the Thai train system portrait Railway Sleepers who has been AD on films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Acting For All Ages Mar 07, 2017

Show notes

Jean-Pierre Léaud's familiar face graces the cover of the new March/April issue of Film Comment, waiting out his final days in Albert Serra's new film The Death of Louis XIV. As Yonca Talu observes in her feature on the film, "The film relies heavily on Jean-Pierre Léaud’s vulnerable acting. Famous for his vibrant, unrestrained body language as the enfant terrible of the French New Wave, the legendary actor exists in a state of complete paralysis here, dependent on others to meet his basic needs." In some ways, she continues, the film serves as a symbolic conclusion to the Antoine Doinel cycle—Jean-Pierre Léaud's mere presence adds a layer of film-historical context to the film that might not otherwise be there. This week's episode of the Film Comment podcast explores the nuances of legacy, persona, and presence when it comes to acting. As with Léaud, we watch actors with enduring careers mature onscreen, developing their crafts and playing off of already formed associations that viewers might have with their earlier work. The panel—Shonni Enelow, English professor at Fordham and author of Method Acting and Its Discontents; Nick Pinkerton of the New York Film Critics Circle; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Violet Lucca, Film Comment Digital Producer—muses on the shifting modes of expression and physicality of performers like Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Gerard Depardieu, and Sissy Spacek.

Steve Bannon Feb 28, 2017

Show notes

As filmmaker and critic Jeff Reichert put it in his January/February 2017 Film Comment feature on Steve Bannon's documentary work, "We could dismiss Bannon as the Rainer Werner Fassbinder of shoddily made straight-to-video white supremacist documentary. But his tactics have helped put Trump in the White House, so what can we learn about Bannon or America from watching them?" This episode of the Film Comment podcast tackles that very question. Reichert, along with Chapo Trap House podcast co-host Will Menaker and FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca, looks back on Bannon's nine films released under the “Citizens United” banner. It goes without saying that there's a lot to talk about regarding their unlikely aesthetic sensibility (sales presentation meets Leni Riefenstahl meets Michael Bay meets Vic Berger ECUs) and their characterizations of history and reality. The panel also digs into the past 15 years of political documentary on the right and the left (hello, Adam Curtis!), including the ways in which filmmakers package narratives, fact-check their material, and consider their audiences.

Before And After, Live Feb 21, 2017

Show notes

In his 1985 film God's Country, Louis Malle visits a small town in Minnesota both before and after Reagan's election, documenting the stark economic despair that the agricultural community was forced to face. Following a screening of God's Country in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's screening series Film Comment Selects, we conducted a live the Film Comment Podcast about how we differently perceive certain films before and after the election. To discuss this fraught political moment, we invited Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution and FC's Cinema '67 Revisited column; Genevieve Yue, critic and assistant professor at the New School's Eugene Lang College; and Farihah Zaman, filmmaker, critic, and Production Manager for Field of Vision to join FC Editor Nicolas Rapold and FC Digital Producer and podcast host Violet Lucca. Films discussed include those by Chris Marker, Errol Morris, Jason Osder, Alexander Payne, and more.

The King of Cinema Feb 14, 2017

Show notes

“I always go back to Ozu and Bresson, both of whom I admire a great deal. I like the way Bresson frames midriff: a person going across the room but you’re just seeing the half, the midriff of the body. The scene in Pickpocket at the racetrack. And Hitchcock, any of the inserts: the scene in The Wrong Man where Fonda is booked and Hitchcock shows you the detail, each step of the process. It has such a sense of isolation and helplessness, because these objects, these inserts, they speak to you. They tell you how to look at them. They direct the viewer,” Martin Scorsese said to Nick Pinkerton in the cover feature of our January/February issue. This special live episode of the Film Comment podcast deep-dives into perhaps the most appropriate Scorsese film for a live media event, The King of Comedy, shown in the Museum of the Moving Image’s Martin Scorsese retrospective. Following its screening of the film, the Museum hosted The Film Comment Podcast, featuring Pinkerton; Eric Hynes, MoMI curator and FC columnist; Nicolas Rapold, Editor; and Violet Lucca, Digital Editor. The lively conversation covers the film's unsettling mix of humor and discomfort, its open-ended slippage between fantasy and reality, its place in the careers of Scorsese and De Niro, and the myriad ways in which Rupert Pupkin's name gets hopelessly botched. Listen and enjoy, whether or not your office happens to be a Pupkin-esque setup in a Times Square phone booth. And as a special treat, the discussion is followed by a guided audio tour of the museum's exhibition of Scorsese artifacts with Lucca and MoMI Chief Curator David Schwartz.

Women In New Hollywood Feb 07, 2017

Show notes

Road-tripping crises of masculinity soundtracked by classic rock, Harvey Keitel making up for his sins in the streets—a laundry list of 1970s New Hollywood highlights can tend to lack a nuanced female presence. But the ’70s also gave us Wanda, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Girlfriends, A Woman Under the Influence, and even Five Easy Pieces, all of which explore female identity in the era of second-wave feminism. This episode of the Film Comment podcast spirals outwards from From Reverence to Rape author Molly Haskell's essay on Mike Mills's 20th Century Women and accompanying interview with Annette Bening, in the January/February issue, taking a closer look at depictions of women in New Hollywood. Some of these were "neo-women's films," dealing with disillusioned housewives fleeing the domestic sphere; others took on female friendship without turning a blind eye to its messiness, a line that runs through Thelma and Louise, Frances Ha, and Broad City. In addition to Haskell, FC Deep Cuts columnist Margaret Barton-Fumo stops by to join the conversation, and as always, Digital Editor Violet Lucca moderates.

Raoul Peck + Dustin Guy Defa and Laura Dunn Jan 31, 2017

Show notes

This week's two-pronged episode of the Film Comment podcast digs into a varied slate of contemporary filmmaking. First, from the New York Film Festival, FC columnist and Museum of the Moving Image Associate Curator Eric Hynes speaks to Raoul Peck, whose vital new film I Am Not Your Negro opens this Friday, February 3 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Peck explains his approach to James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House, his use of archival footage to create arresting counterpoints, his experience rehearsing Samuel L. Jackson to deliver Baldwin's words, and his personal reflections on the author's work. Our podcast then flashes forward for a final dispatch from the Sundance Film Festival, a live discussion from the Kickstarter House featuring two directors the magazine has supported who have made films with the help of crowdfunding: Laura Dunn, who co-directed Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry (shown in Sundance’s Spotlight section), and Dustin Guy Defa, who directed Person to Person (in the NEXT section). Dunn’s prior feature, The Unforeseen (2007), was deemed “best film of the festival, hands down” in these pages, and so we were eager to see where she took Look & See, a Kickstarter project. Likewise, Defa’s feature Bad Fever, another Kickstarter alum, received the magazine’s high praise (“a small-scale, painfully candid examination of the connection between loneliness and creativity”—which is a good thing), and so expectations were high for his latest, Person to Person.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected