The Film Comment Podcast

Plenty of films open with an establishing shot of a city's iconic skyline, or of a few iconic barns, only to go on and use the location as an anonymous backdrop. But few and far between are films that actually use the specificity that comes from location shooting to express something about the city's history, the characters, and the story itself. The cover story of our July/August issue is the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time—a New York film through and through—and in the same issue’s Art and Craft column, we asked veteran location manager Ken Lavet to reflect on the art of scouting for Steven Soderbergh and other filmmakers. "It always starts with the story—whether it's in a beat sheet form or a script or a treatment of some kind,” Lavet writes. “Hopefully I get some description from the screenwriter—of, say, a house, or an apartment building, or an office. And I start looking with that in mind." In this episode, Film Comment contributors Nick Pinkerton, Eric Hynes, and Margaret Barton-Fumo join Digital Producer Violet Lucca to discuss a film shot in their hometown, and access how each film interfaces with their lived experience of those places.

As David Thomson succinctly puts it in the July/August issue, "Wanda is the kind of person who didn’t and still doesn’t get into American movies (unless she’s got a few dollars for a ticket)." Based on a newspaper story about a woman convicted of robbery who thanked the judge for sentencing her to jail for 20 years, Wanda is an unapologetic look at life in America's coal country starring its director and writer, Barbara Loden. Still relatively hard to see, the 1970 film has experienced a(nother) recent critical resurgence thanks in part to Nathalie Léger's book about the film, which charts the writer’s quest to discover more about Loden's life and the soul-searching that ensues. In this episode, Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Shonni Enelow, author of Method Acting and Its Discontent, and regular FC contributors Nick Pinkerton and Margaret Barton-Fumo.

What do we talk about when we talk about independent film? At various points it’s referred to a freedom of style, or it’s been shorthand for a low-budget film outside of the studio system. In his Cannes coverage, Kent Jones cites Larry Gross’s prophetic declaration that independent film would go from an “actual economic position within the film industry to pure marketing speak.” Nevertheless, filmmakers across the country (yes, in between L.A. and New York!) are still making films with humor and velocity, even, maybe especially, as the cultural and economic conditions become ever more precarious. Rather than retrace the well-trod mythology of independent film history, the contributors to this episode of The Film Comment Podcast have selected a few contemporary independent filmmakers—from Anna Biller to the Safdie Brothers—and some favorite practitioners from years past. Participants: Nellie Killian, Senior Programmer at BAMcinématek; Gina Telaroli, filmmaker, critic, and archivist; Violet Lucca, digital producer at Film Comment; and Nicolas Rapold, Editor of Film Comment.

We expect that discrete scenes will play off of one another to create any given feature film, but what happens when one of these moments tugs the narrative in an unexpected direction? Sometimes the moment works, and sometimes it doesn’t—and in the context of a bad film, the misfires might even indicate the possibility of a better film lurking within. There’s also a certain how-did-this-happen fascination in finding a truly awful moment in an otherwise excellent film, suggesting that—surprise—perhaps art isn’t a matter of perfection. This week’s episode of The Film Comment Podcast considers these moments of dissonance and what alternate narrative realities and artistic impulses they might indicate… for better or for worse. To ruminate on these nuances, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca asks this week’s participants—Ashley Clark, programmer and FC contributor; Shonni Enelow, author of Method Acting and Its Discontents; and Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center—to bring in case studies of good scenes in bad films and bad scenes in good films.

Having programmed two high-profile Netflix premieres, Bong Joon Ho’s Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), in the main competition, Cannes was shadowed by a debate over distribution—theatrical versus streaming—and the role of heavyweight newcomers Amazon and Netflix. The controversy placed streaming services in direct opposition to cinemas, but the shifting landscape is more complex; for one, Amazon also distributes its titles with more conventional theatrical rollouts, and the same-day VOD release model doesn’t apply to every Amazon title in the market. This episode of The Film Comment Podcast focuses not only on streaming, but also on the interactions between global markets and studios, film critics and consumers, and cinephiles and local art house circuits—and why it’s difficult to make a monolithic statement about what the future holds. Daniel Loría, Editorial Director of Box Office Magazine, and Nick Pinkerton, member of the New York Film Critics Circle, offer up their insights in conversation with FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca.

Maybe it’s the magnetic pull of a performance, a sequence, or a mood, but there are some movies that demand multiple rewatches. This episode of the podcast samples some films that keep our critics coming back, and here—staring at last into the abyss of compulsive movie love—they do some soul-searching as to why they resonate so strongly. Questions of childhood nostalgia or perfect timing enter the mix, as well as how personal responses to a film might shift over time. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca offers a couple of “movie addictions” with Ashley Clark, regular Film Comment contributor; K. Austin Collins, staff writer for The Ringer; and Michael Koresky, Director of Creative and Editorial Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

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.

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.

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.

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.