The Film Comment Podcast

Comedies and genre films may not be the usual Croisette fare, but that wasn’t the case with the 69th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Touching on Maren Ade’s unanimously praised Toni Erdmann, as well as more divisive films like Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper and Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, a roundtable hosted by editor Nicolas Rapold and featuring Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times; Nicholas Elliott, New York correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma; and FILM COMMENT contributing editors Jonathan Romney and Amy Taubin breaks down this year’s unique selection.

Plenty of films are set in the past, either adapted from texts from the period or written by authors looking back on history (and likely bringing their own biases to it). Yet only a select few of such works manage to so convincingly convey a tactile sense of the time that they approach the immersive. And which genuine traces of the present captured by filmmakers—be it locations, attitudes, or small details like trash in the street—will serve as accurate snapshots for the future? Digital Editor Violet Lucca spoke with Nick Pinkerton, regular FILM COMMENT contributor, and Eric Hynes, FC columnist and associate curator at the Museum of the Moving Image, to discuss how history is made (or unmade) on film.

It’s that most special time of year: the May/June issue has arrived! What’s inside? We’re glad you asked: FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca takes an informative stroll through the new issue with Nicolas Rapold, Editor in Chief. And, in the second half of this episode, we expand upon the new issue’s major feature on French filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. For decades, the pair created an insightful body of work that delved deeply into history and art. Working closely together in all aspects of film production, they created personalized cinematic visions, frequently using the works of other artists—literature, painting, and film—as a jumping-off point to explore contemporary political issues. Violet Lucca speaks with Dan Sullivan, programmer at Film Society of Lincoln Center; Ted Fendt, editor of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet; and Josh Siegel, curator at MoMA, to discuss MoMA’s complete retrospective of Straub-Huillet that begins this Friday.

On June 28, 1969, following a police raid of the Greenwich Village LGBT bar Stonewall Inn, a riot broke out around the neighborhood that continued into the following evening. The upheaval is commonly treated as the beginning of the contemporary gay rights movement. As with many accounts of history, the clear demarcation—as if the lights were suddenly flipped on—doesn’t entirely hold water under close scrutiny, but the Stonewall Riots have become a useful point of reference as well as a symbol. The Film Society's repertory series “A Clue to the New Direction: Queer Cinema Before Stonewall,” curated by FSLC programmer at larger Thomas Beard, takes these events as an opportunity to explore multiple histories of queer cinema through a variety of Hollywood, experimental, nonfiction, and foreign films. Digital Editor Violet Lucca discussed the films, and the history, with Mark Harris, film historian and columnist for Vulture; Michael Koresky, director of publications at the Metrograph Theater; and Manuel Betancourt, FC contributor.

Described by Joan Dupont in the March/April issue of FILM COMMENT as “too haunted to be the suave lady-killer and too classy to be the loser,” Vincent Lindon has slowly gained prominence outside of France in his quietly simmering performances in films like Claire Denis’s Bastards and Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of a Man. Wesley Morris of The New York Times and Amy Taubin, contributor to FILM COMMENT and Artforum, spoke with Digital Editor Violet Lucca about the actor’s working-class charms, the “polymorphous sexuality” of visual artist Ryan Trecartin's work, and the strengths and weaknesses of other actors from John Goodman to Robert Redford.

Following the bold experiment of Boyhood, Richard Linklater returns with Everybody Wants Some!!, a semi-autobiographical movie about the infinite potential that awaits at the cusp of adulthood. A few days before the start of college classes, Jake (Blake Jenner), a freshman pitcher, moves into a house with his fellow ball players; drunken hilarity and horndogging ensue, while salient points about identity get made. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca asked David Fear of Rolling Stone and Nick Pinkerton, frequent FC contributor, for their thoughts on Linklater’s latest and their leading contenders for their top sports movies.

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.

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’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.

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).