The Film Comment Podcast

In the college town of Columbia, Missouri, the True/False Film Fest has grown to become one of the world’s premiere showcases of cutting-edge nonfiction filmmaking. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold returned to moderate “Toasted,” the festival’s late-night wrap-up event in front of a live, very lively audience, abridged for clarity here as a Film Comment podcast. Rapold was joined by a superlative crew of critics, programmers, and filmmaking talent including Mara Gourd Mercado, general director of Montreal docfest RIDM; Tayler Montague, freelance critic and programmer; Chris Boeckmann and Abby Sun, programmers at True/False; Rok Bicek, director of The Family; and Ashley Clark, senior film programmer at BAMcinématek. The freewheeling discussion kicks off with Bicek discussing The Family before it moves on to Zhang Mengqi’s Self-Portrait: Birth in 47 KM, Reece Auguiste’s Twilight City and the Black Audio Film Collective retrospective, Khalik Allah’s Black Mother, Leilah Weinraub’s SHAKEDOWN, and many more documentaries.

In honor of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of Lucrecia Martel’s work and theatrical run of Zama, we re-present this episode analyzing the film. Premiered in Venice and screened in last year’s New York Film Festival, Zama marks not only the long-awaited return of Lucrecia Martel, but also her first literary adaptation. Martel expanded on the first-person fever dream of the original 1956 novel by Antonio di Benedetto, whose fans included Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar. This week’s episode of The Film Comment Podcast ruminates on Zama’s novelistic origins with the help of literary translator and CUNY professor Esther Allen, who produced the first English translation of Zama in 2016, for which she won the 2017 National Translation Award in Prose. Allen is joined by Dennis Lim, Director of Programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Violet Lucca, FC Digital Producer and podcast host, to discuss the subconscious presences Martel might imply beyond the edges of her frames.

With the ostensible arrival of spring comes the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA’s New Directors/New Films. In this year’s crop the traditions of various genres and national cinemas plays out in often spectacular fashion, as well as up-close-and-personal narratives. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Nicolas Rapold, FC Editor-in-Chief, and Devika Girish, contributor to the magazine, to reflect on those films that caught their eyes, including Our House, Closeness, Good Manners, The Great Buddha +, and more.

Just in time for Easter (and a new series celebrating Al Pacino at The Quad), this episode honors an often-misunderstood subcategory of star: hams. Ranging from the amusing to glorious to cringeworthy, these actors call attention to themselves in ways that can overtake and redefine the films they’re performing in. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Ashley Clark, senior programmer of cinema at BAM, and Michael Koresky, editorial director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, to chew over these over-the-top performers who produce a certain joy that a subtler actor can’t. From cops pontificating about posteriors in Heat to Maine put-down artists in Dolores Claiborne, this gammon-fueled chat is one for the ages.

In the March/April issue of Film Comment, Lauren Kaminsky wrote about Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin: "a delirious historical mash-up that compiles sometimes independently factual details in utterly counterfactual ways. It can therefore convey nothing about causation and is largely apolitical, but it is a spot-on satire of socialist realism and the authoritarian political culture of high Stalinism.” In our digital age, the prominence of news satire and satirical news has helped make politics more immediate—Iannucci being a prime mover through work like In the Loop and Veep—but the intermingling of humor and facts brings its own complications. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca spoke with Kaminsky about the Russian humor this film exerts within the context of Anglo-American satire of today’s political events.

All too often, women’s opinions are considered valuable only in certain situations: when there’s a problem affecting women, when there’s an opportunity to market to women, when there’s a president that is a deeply reactionary sexual predator. Nellie Killian’s series “Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories” attempts to show the multitude of experiences and issues that come to light when a director takes the simple but radical step of having a woman tell her story to the camera. Spanning several decades as well as a variety of lengths, the 34 films in the series open up a free space for discussion of how issues of class, race, immigration, violence, crime, sex, or “just” being a housewife affect women. Interspersing clips from the films, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca speaks with Killian, who is also a contributing editor to FC; Farihah Zaman, filmmaker (Remote Area Medical), critic, and Field of Vision Production Manager; and Sierra Pettengill, filmmaker (The Reagan Show) and occasional contributor to Frieze magazine. Films discussed: Soft Fiction, Janie’s Janie, The Women’s Film, Mimi, Suzanne Suzanne, Audience

Featuring the talents of Bill Gunn (Ganja & Hess), Vertamae Grosvenor (Daughters of the Dust), Ishmael Reed, and many others, Personal Problems was originally intended as “an experimental soap opera” for WNET, the public broadcast station in New York. It never aired and was thought lost for many years, but the film has been newly restored by Kino Lorber and will be traveling theatrically soon, beginning with a run at Metrograph. Written by Ishmael Reed and shot in 1979, Personal Problems stars Vertamae Grosvenor as Johnnie Mae, a nurse’s aide at Harlem Hospital who’s having an affair behind the back of her uptight transit worker husband Charles (Walter Cotton). In the March/April 2018 issue, Howard Hampton writes about this incredible work, a “motion picture [that] is inventing its language as it goes along—a series of building blocks of different shapes, tones, and materials creating a homemade Cubist mosaic. Personal Problems balances hands-on and hands-off approaches.” Tobi Haslett, contributor to N+1, 4Columns, and The New Yorker, speaks with FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca about this distinctive work.

From the way in which the experiences of African Americans are portrayed on screen, to the way skin color is captured on film, the history of movies and photography is inextricable from race. How do nonwhite, nonmale filmmakers create a language that equalizes a subject? What sort of language and historical practices are required to reflect these perspectives? In this live discussion at Film Comment Selects titled “Race and Representation,” Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold discusses these questions with Antonio Méndez Esparza, director of Life and Nothing More (the opening night film of the series), RaMell Ross, director of Hale County This Morning, This Evening (winner of a prize at Sundance), and Professor Racquel Gates, author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture.

Valeska Grisebach’s extremely precise yet highly naturalistic films take years to make: so far, we have been graced with only three features. In the January/February issue of Film Comment, Haden Guest discusses Grisebach’s process of “radical observation,” as well as her relationship to existing genre forms and aesthetics. Western, Grisebach’s latest film, follows a group of German workers building a hydroelectric plant in the backlands of Bulgaria. Separated by linguistic and cultural differences, one of the German workers—Meinhard—slowly begins to bridge the gap between the two camps. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Film Society of Lincoln Center programmers Dennis Lim and Dan Sullivan and Brooklyn Rail film section co-editor Leo Goldsmith to discuss the film, Grisebach’s filmography, and her relationship to new forms of realism.

After being notorious as a “hotbed” of piracy for many years, the Chinese market is now more rightly regarded as the second-largest in the world. In the January/February issue of Film Comment, Nick Pinkerton and Andrew Chan respectively report on Hollywood’s deals with mainland multiplexes and aspiring mogul Jia Zhangke. As the middle class has grown, new venues and festivals seek to satiate their desire for more entertainment options—big, small, or somewhere in-between. In this episode of the podcast, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Andrew Chan, web editor at the Criterion Collection, and Aliza Ma, head programmer at Metrograph, to discuss Chinese film culture, sprawling multiplexes, censorship, and the types of films that do and don’t get made anymore on the Mainland and off. Read Andrew’s feature online: https://www.filmcomment.com/article/jia-zhangke-pingyao-film-festival/