The Film Comment Podcast

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Art of the Real 2016 Apr 05, 2016

Show notes

Since film’s inception—from the Lumière’s early actualités to Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North—the boundary between documentary and fiction film has been fairly fluid (or not even a term of discussion.) And as Jacques Rivette once observed: “Every film is a documentary of its own making.” Thanks in part to the relative ease and low cost of digital filmmaking tools, directors from a variety of backgrounds have more leeway to explore and expand the definition of documentary, incorporating fictional or fictionalized elements into non-fiction works. Now in its third year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series The Art of the Real offers a showcase for such films, and offers a variety of documentaries, hybrid documentaries, experimental films, and narrative films in a non-fiction context. Co-programmed by Dennis Lim, director of programming at Film Society, and Rachael Rakes, a programmer at large at Film Society, this year’s program includes films culled from festivals from around the world: Ben Rivers’s What Means Something, Mauro Herce’s Dead Slow Ahead, Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, Sergio Oksman’s O Futebol, Ju Anqi’s Poet on a Business Trip, Andrés Duque’s Oleg and the Rare Arts, Roberto Minervini’s The Other Side, Im Heung-soon, Factory Complex, Thom Anderson’s The Thoughts That Once We Had, and Hassen Ferhani’s A Roundabout in My Head, to name a few. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by Lim and Rakes, as well as Eric Hynes, FILM COMMENT columnist and associate director of programming at the Museum of the Moving Image, to discuss the motivations behind the series, and the films themselves.

Comebacks Mar 29, 2016

Show notes

In the spirit of fantasy football—or, you know, film criticism—FILM COMMENT contributors Michael Koresky (editor of Reverse Shot and director of publications of the Metrograph theater) and Ashley Clark (author of Facing Blackness) joined Digital Editor Violet Lucca to discuss the actors they feel deserve a renaissance.

Arnaud Desplechin and Kent Jones Mar 22, 2016

Show notes

Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days takes the characters of his third feature, My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument, and puts them into new (but also familiar) narratives, collapsing and expanding our understanding of them. Not unlike Peter Parker, Desplechin’s protagonist “Paul Dedalus” has been reimagined and rebooted for contemporary audiences… sort of. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca spoke with Desplechin and Kent Jones, director of the New York Film Festival, Deputy Editor of FILM COMMENT, and co-writer of Desplechin’s Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, to talk about creating My Golden Days. Their conversation also touched upon the state of Hollywood filmmaking, and that most disreputable genre, the rom-com.

New Directors / New Films 2016 Mar 15, 2016

Show notes

Now in its 45th year, New Directors / New Films showcases fiction and documentary work from around the world. These filmmakers offer bold visions and confidently stake out fresh territory on cinema’s frontiers. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by David Fear of Rolling Stone, Eric Hynes, FILM COMMENT columnist and Associate Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, and Amy Taubin, New York Film Festival selection committee member and contributing editor to FILM COMMENT and Artforum, discuss what films in the lineup left them raving (or loudly sighing).

Representing History + Isabelle Huppert Interview Mar 08, 2016

Show notes

Though we’re taught to compartmentalize historical movements into discrete events and dates, the truth (or what we know of it) is anything but. Four recent films— Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor, Jia Zhang-ke’s Mountains May Depart, Amos Gitai’s Rabin, the Last Day, and Laszlo Nemes’s Son of Saul—take very different but ambitious aesthetic approaches to historical trauma. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by FILM COMMENT's Nicolas Rapold, The Nation critic Stuart Klawans, and New York Times and FILM COMMENT contributor J. Hoberman to discuss these films’ varying approaches, strengths, and blind spots. We also have a special interview with French icon Isabelle Huppert, who spoke with Yonca Talu about Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love and working with Maurice Pialat and Claude Chabrol (with a few words about her next collaborator, Michael Haneke).

Better Living Through Criticism Mar 01, 2016

Show notes

Criticism gets a bad rap a lot of the time, even from its practitioners. But rather than a defense of criticism, A.O. Scott. a chief film critic for The New York Times, has written a kind of long-form thought experiment around the profession that traces the impetuses behind criticism and its myriad functions. Scott's Better Living Through Criticism explores how we determine our own taste, the value and function of criticism in our current media environment, some (low) points in its history, and rhetorical issues, pulling from a wide variety of texts from poetry to performance art to criticism in its many guises. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by Scott and another veteran critic, Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com and New York magazine, to discuss ideas raised by the book and how larger changes in media have affected their careers and the profession at large

Live from Film Comment Selects Feb 24, 2016

Show notes

It's that most wonderful time of year: Film Comment Selects! This edition of our annual series of eclectic, international, and avant-garde films offered a host of pleasures: a revival of Chantal Akerman’s musical Golden Eighties, Terence Davies's exquisite period piece Sunset Song, new films by Benoît Jacquot, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Alexei German Jr., and a special spotlight on the work of recently deceased Polish auteur Andrzej Żuławski. On Saturday, Film Comment's Violet Lucca and Nicolas Rapold assembled contributors Eric Hynes, Margaret Barton-Fumo, and Michael Koresky to discuss the work of Davies and Żuławski in front of a live audience during Film Comment Selects. The special edition was called Film Comment, Live!

Influences Feb 16, 2016

Show notes

Now that “takes,” gossip, and conversations about film can be instantly broadcast to the world, it’s sometimes easy to forget that above all else, film criticism is an act of writing. In a frank and accessible dialogue, Mark Harris, film historian and Vulture columnist, Eric Hynes, critic, journalist, and Associate Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image, talk about the writers and larger cultural trends (be it the rise of VHS or social media) that have shaped their own approaches to the medium.

The Coen Brothers and Peter Greenaway Feb 09, 2016

Show notes

At first blush, the Coen Brothers and Peter Greenaway don’t appear to have much in common except that their new films, Hail, Caesar!and Eisenstein in Guanajuato, both came out the same day. Yet their films used to share art-house marquee space in the late '80s and early '90s when they attracted notoriety and criticism of all stripes. Although their paths have diverged considerably, their new films are united by the way in which the filmmakers construct a world of artifice, steeped in references yet inhabited in very different ways: for the Coens, it’s the glitzy movie-verse of Capitol Pictures; for Greenaway, it’s a wild combination of art history, politics, and Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished film, ¡Que viva México!. FILM COMMENT's Violet Lucca and Nicolas Rapold are joined by Kent Jones, director of the New York Film Festival, and Nick Pinkerton, regular FC contributor, to discuss these films and especially the Coen Brothers' ever-evolving oeuvre.

Douglas Sirk and Representation Jan 26, 2016

Show notes

The Film Society of Lincoln Center recently mounted a major retrospective of Douglas Sirk’s films, which included his first German productions from the Thirties (The Girl from the Marsh Croft, La Habanera) to his Technicolor melodramas of the Fifties (All that Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind). A masterful observer of American society—like fellow German émigrés Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch—Sirk’s films explore uncomfortable, unspoken truths and conjure complicated, conflicting feelings. FILM COMMENT’s Violet Lucca sat down with FC contributors Nick Pinkerton, Margaret Barton-Fumo, and Ashley Clark to discuss race and representation in Taza, Son of Cochise (54), The Tarnished Angels (57), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (58), Imitation of Life (59), and more.

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