The Film Comment Podcast

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

The first Sundance Film Festival, then known as the US/Utah Film Festival, took place in 1978 in an effort to bring independent filmmaking talent to the state. Over the years, word spread, crowds grew, and first-time directors broke out as commercial buyers eventually clued into the potential of this latest wave of American independent film—and now, nearly four decades later, Sundance remains an industry phenomenon. But reading about its history only goes so far, especially for a festival renowned for its original mission of fostering an independent film community. In this special episode of the Film Comment podcast recorded at Sundance in front of an audience at the Kickstarter house, Editor Nicolas Rapold spoke with a panel of Sundance veterans: Ira Deutchman, film producer, distributor, marketer (of sex, lies, and videotape, among others), academic, and co-founder of Emerging Pictures; Eugene Hernandez, Deputy Director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the co-founder of Indiewire; Lesli Klainberg, Executive Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and a documentary filmmaker whose work has been shown at numerous Sundances; and Dan Mirvish, co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival and author of The Cheerful Subversive's Guide to Independent Filmmaking. The discussion (featuring a couple of surprise guests) covered the evolution of Sundance up through the 1990s and beyond as a force in the industry, its importance to queer media and representation, its significance to mainstream perceptions of independent film, and more.

Alpine air, ski-friendly powder, and independent film converge every January at the Sundance Film Festival. And now, as a slight respite from the hype tweets, the Film Comment podcast is proud to transmit a little bit of Park City to your earbuds with this critics' roundtable, recorded live at Sundance this past weekend. FC Editor Nicolas Rapold, frequent FC contributors Nick Pinkerton and Ashley Clark, and freelance critic Paula Mejia share early festival impressions and highlights from the worlds of fiction, documentary, and virtual reality (housed in the grandiosely titled "VR Palace"). And be sure to check back in as the festival progresses for more dispatches from FC writers.

Ideology and aesthetics have somehow come to be positioned opposite one another—in film criticism, should one be privileged over the other? This episode of The Film Comment Podcast discusses how race, ethnicity, and other markers of identity factor into film criticism and cinema generally. FC Digital Editor Violet Lucca unpacks the topic with Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor to FC and Artforum, and Ashley Clark, FC contributor and programmer, in a conversation that spans multiple decades of film history—from Taxi Driver to OJ: Made in America to Notting Hill to I Am Not Your Negro, to the canceled Michael Jackson episode of Urban Myths starring Joseph Fiennes.

Questions of legacy can rile up the creative juices in unexpected ways, especially when filmmakers who win a bit of success are allowed to dive headlong into their obsessions. In cases like these, equipped with higher budgets and greater creative freedom, a filmmaker sets out to make A Statement. At best, it's an opportunity to show off one's talents with unbridled freedom of expression; at worst, it can lapse into gratuitous excess. This episode of the Film Comment podcast takes up passion projects, particularly those in which filmmakers are given the "keys to the kingdom" after a commercial success. It can be an anxiety-inducing move—as the tagline for Zardoz, John Boorman's 1974 sci fi statement and Deliverance follow-up, aptly prophesied, "I have seen the future, and IT...DOESN'T...WORK." As always, Digital Editor Violet Lucca moderates, and is joined by FC mainstays Ashley Clark, film critic and programmer; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Nick Pinkerton, member of the New York Film Critics Circle.